A War-Torn Future
by Pegasai
Summary: A thousand years after the time of the shinobi, instead of Zero, Ciel discovers a sealed Naruto inside the ancient ruins that she risked her life to find. Having few options, she recruits him to fight against Neo Arcadia. For his part, Naruto wakes up to find himself without many of his memories and in yet another war-torn world devoid of peace.
1. Breaking of the Seal

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

**Foreword: Naruto is one of my favorite male manga characters, mainly for his backstory and his potential for growth while Ciel is one of my favorite female video game/manga (yes, there is a manga…although it's pretty bad) characters, mainly for her character design. I figured I'd try a Mega Man Zero and Naruto crossover. To my knowledge, there isn't a single one yet.**

**This setting of the story is mostly the setting used in the Mega Man Zero games. However, for storytelling purposes, I will make changes as I see fit.**

* * *

**_Electronic Diary Entry #2-1031-1_**

_"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…"_

_…and no other words could better describe this era._

_Humans lived in a utopia called Neo Arcadia. "Heaven on Earth," it was called, and unsurprisingly so. Humans were free from labor, worry, and sorrow. Even death was held at bay with incredibly advanced medical technology, allowing humans to live double or even triple their normal lifespans. _

_Yet…_

_It was a perfect world built upon the remains of innocent Reploids. After the Elf Wars, there was peace, but also a grave energy shortage. Copy X, the de facto ruler of Neo Arcadia, decided to prioritize human quality of life and ordered the retirement of countless Reploids in an effort to save energy._

_I could not sit and watch. It was my responsibility. After all, I…I was the one who created Copy X. I fled Neo Arcadia and created the Resistance as a haven for Reploids who had been falsely condemned by Neo Arcadia. _

_But there was little hope. Copy X was every bit as strong as the original, legendary X._

_And so, I headed towards the legendary ruins together with the Reploids that were being pursued by Neo Arcadia._

_Yes…towards the ruins where our one hope remained…_

_~ Ciel _

_(adapted from Ciel's Memories: Prologue – Mega Man Zero Audio Drama)_

* * *

"Hu…huff…huh…huff…" Ciel panted as she ran as hard as she could along the corridors of the abandoned shrine.

Ciel was an "Enlightened One," a human with a modified genome. Relative to normal humans she had higher intellect and stamina, allowing her to work more effectively and for longer hours.

But that didn't mean that she could outrun combat Reploids indefinitely. No matter how much human DNA was optimized, humans could never match the potential of Reploids.

"Ciel, this way! Quickly!"

Ciel quickly jumped to the side to join Milan and several other Resistance Reploids. They all held their breaths as Pantheons and Golems passed their hiding spot.

They were currently on a mission deep inside Neo Arcadia to find the legendary Reploid Zero. They had studied the legends and concluded that Zero was sealed in a large underground laboratory the size of a small city. They had found the city, but so had Neo Arcadia.

And thus, Neo Arcadia was doing everything in its power to prevent the Resistance from getting their hands on a powerful warrior.

It was a race in which the Resistance had a head start in but the Neo Arcadians had finally caught up. And considering Neo Arcadia's brutality towards any dissenters, that wasn't a good thing for them.

"Th…thank y…you," she gasped out. "I'm sorry that I'm slowing all of you down."

"No," Milan shook his head. "You're the one who gave us purpose and even a chance to survive. You're the one who even found out about Zero. We would never think that you were slowing us down."

"I sense it," a voice interrupted in an earnest tone. "Follow me."

They all looked up to the Cyber-Elf who had spoken. Passy, Ciel's Cyber-Elf friend, had her eyes closed in an effort to sense the ancient power around them.

"Let's go," Ciel whispered to her friends and subordinates before they followed Passy.

Soon, they came upon a large circular room that had fallen into ruin. Even compared to the rest of the abandoned shrine, this room seemed to be in especially poor condition. In spite of that, however, Ciel and the other Resistance members could tell from the marks on the double doors that this room was special.

"A dead end?" Ciel lamented in frustration when she pushed futilely against the doors.

It was so unfair!

They had come so far to fail at the very last moment. There _had _to be something beyond the doors. They absolutely had to find a way to open the doors!

"No. I feel strong energy emanating from here. This must be the place," Passy remarked as she flitted side to side around the doors. "We just need to open the doors with sufficient amount of force."

Ciel watched appraisingly as Milan stepped up and pounded on the thick stone doors.

"The doors are surprisingly sturdy," Milan said with a frown. "There doesn't seem to be anything in particular protecting the doors so I think we can destroy them with our busters, but that will alert every Pantheon in the area."

There was a pause. With only a dozen Resistance soldiers, they had no chance against the hundreds of Pantheons scourging the area. The Resistance "soldiers" were actually civilian Reploids volunteers who had very little combat ability or training. They would be hard pressed to fight even against an equal number of Pantheons.

Against hundreds? It was definitely suicide.

Ciel opened her mouth, but Sourde, a stocky Reploid, put up his buster before she could speak. "Let's do it. Milan, you take Ciel-san inside to find Zero. The rest of us will stay out here to buy you time."

"B…but!" Ciel protested. She didn't want any more of her friends to die. They were Reploids, but they were still sentient and were alive.

"Twenty of us have died on the way here," Geai, a female Reploid, replied in a determined voice. "We can't let their sacrifice go to waste. You should go! We'll take care of them until you can wake Zero up. Once he wakes up, he should be able to help us break out."

Ciel wasn't too sure about that, but she was abruptly pushed to the side.

"Enough talk. Stay back, Ciel," Milan said as he fired his buster, effectively ending discussion.

_Boom! Wham!_

The doors blew apart and fell to the ground after several shots from the soldiers' busters.

"Let's hurry," Ciel urged as she ran forward with newfound resolve.

If her friends were going to lay down their lives, then she had to try her best as well. She wasn't going to idle around and squander the time they were buying for her.

"Huh?" Ciel gasped as they walked in. The entire room was covered in strange runes and symbols that were glowing with an eerie blue light. "What is this place? I've never seen such characters before! This place looks hundreds of years old!"

"Look!" Milan pointed a large statue in the middle. The statue appeared to be a nine-eyed humanoid figure that was sitting in a meditative position. Ciel hadn't noticed it because she had been too engrossed with the glowing characters around the room. "There's a person sitting at the very bottom of the statue!"

The said person was clothed in red, black, and orange and was also sitting in a meditative position.

"This must be…Zero…" Ciel said in awe. Even she could feel the power emanating from the person in front of her. The energy field was obscuring her vision and she couldn't see the figure too well, but circumstantial evidence supported that this was Zero. The reports written during the Elf Wars described Zero having red and black armor.

"We found him at last!" Milan said with a sigh of relief. "Let's wake him up." Milan walked forward and was repelled by a strange energy field. "Waaahh!"

"It's protected," Passy analyzed as she spun around the figure, "with a power greater than what a buster can destroy," she added when Milan raised his buster.

"What should we do?" Milan asked worriedly. "We don't have much time. Our friends won't be able to hold on much longer."

Milan's words proved to be prophetic.

"AHHH!"

Ciel and Milan swerved around quickly and looked back towards the entrance. The sight of dozens of Pantheons chilled their hearts. The Resistance soldiers had fallen quickly and the Pantheons were now marching in.

"We're cornered!" Ciel cried.

"Ciel! Watch out!" Milan cried as he pushed Ciel to the side. "Arrghh!"

"Milan!" Ciel screamed as several energy bullets tore Milan's body apart. "Milan! No!"

"Ciel…" Passy said.

Ciel didn't replied and fell down on her knees in grief. It was a small stroke of luck that Milan had pushed her behind Zero and the energy field protecting him because the energy field was repelling all the energy bullets fired in her direction. But Ciel didn't even have the presence of mind to know what was going on. One of her closest friends in the Resistance had just died.

"Ciel!" Passy urgently slammed into Ciel's head.

"Huh?" Ciel looked up, tears still streaming down her face.

"You should use my power to open up the energy field and revive Zero!"

"What? Passy…if I do that, you'll be…"

"You have no choice! Look!" Ciel stood up and looked back. The Pantheons apparently realized that ranged attacks weren't going to work and started marching warily towards her. "Don't worry about me," Passy urged. "Remember, everyone is waiting for your safe return!"

"…okay," Ciel said after a quick moment of thought. It was horrible of her to accept yet another sacrifice from her friend and she was shamed to admit that the sudden fear that gripped her heart at seeing the sea of blue coming towards her play a role in her decision. "Thank you."

"No. I should thank you, Ciel," Passy replied with a smile. "Don't feel guilty, Ciel." Passy gave her a knowing smile. "I know you too well, Ciel. I do this of my own accord. Live and continue to fight for peace. Farewell, friend."

"Passy!" Ciel cried as the Cyber-elf charged into the energy field.

_Boom!_

The blast of energy that resulted knocked her and the Pantheons in the room down. Instantly, the glowing runes stopped glowing and the lights in the room came on.

She opened her eyes to see a blood-red cloak with black flames on the bottom. Her eyes roamed up. Blond hair. Red armor.

"Zero…has been resurrected," Ciel concluded. "Zero," she pleaded, "help me. Please."

"Zero?" The figure in front of her replied as he slowly turned around. "I'm not this Zero you're looking for."

Ciel gasped when she saw that the person was _human_. Normally, it was incredibly difficult for people to tell the difference between an unarmored Reploid and a human being. Technology had come a long way in making Reploids look and sound as human as possible. Reploids had red electrolytic fluids and body chips much in the same way humans had blood and organs. Civilian Reploids even had synthetic skin that even imitated human skin to such a degree that almost no one could tell the difference. But Ciel was the foremost expert on Reploids of the era. She knew when she was looking at a Reploid and when she was looking at a human.

In fact, it was just a boy barely a year or two older than she was.

"You're…you're…" she stammered.

"Later," the boy's eyes narrowed as he saw the Pantheons and their busters. "I don't know what's going on, but I get the feeling that someone I once knew would roll around in his grave if I didn't help a damsel in distress."

"But, you're only human!" she argued. "These are combat—"

Her protest died when she saw the boy make strange hand movements and then _summon_ a violent windstorm out of nowhere. "**Fuuton: Fuujin no Reppuu (Wind Release: Gale of the Wind God)!**"

"Im…impossible…" she breathed out in disbelief as winds raged around the room.

Within a few seconds, every single Pantheon in the room had been shredded to pieces. But Ciel was so shocked that a _human_ somehow displayed such fantastical powers she didn't even react.

The boy grabbed her hand. "Come on! We have to break our way out of here!"

"Uh…yes!"

They ran out the double doors. To Ciel's continued amazement, the boy punched, kicked, and even occasionally slammed some sort of energy ball called Rasengan at any Reploid that got in their way. He somehow did this while deflecting any energy bullet that would stray her way.

"Eww, disgusting…what are those things?" the boy pointed at a bunch of spider-like Reploids that were jumping out of a nest-like object.

Ciel involuntarily grabbed Naruto's hand tighter. She was a Reploid scientist and had seen all sorts of Reploids, but she was also a young girl and did _not _like spiders. A lifetime of training did not completely remove the evolutionary programming for humans to hate such creatures.

She responded as professionally as possible, however, instead of screaming and running away like her instincts kept telling her to. Fortunately, the boy's calming presence helped to mitigate those instincts. "Those Reploids are Hoppiders. They create Kumouteru, those nest-like structures, to replicate inside and build up their power. Don't bother attacking the Kumouteru; those are almost completely impervious to physical damage."

The boy turned around and grinned. "Well, can they repel fire?"

"Fire?" Ciel repeated. "You can't possibly mean…"

But he did.

"**Katon: Hisei Endan (Fireball of the Fire Spirit)!**"

After about thirty more minutes of intermittent fighting and running, they finally reached where an entrance _should_ have been based on the digital map that Ciel had created before entering the laboratory. "What?" Ciel walked up to the newly created concrete wall. "It's a dead end! The Neo Arcadian soldiers must have walled it off to prevent us from escaping." She looked back at the blond boy. "What should we do?"

The boy didn't answer her question because the ground beneath her crumbled. "Watch out!"

"Ahh!" Ciel screamed as she fell. Ciel closed her eyes, but felt the boy catch her in his arms.

When she opened her eyes, they were sliding down the side of the hole. "I can attached myself onto walls," he answered her unasked question. He frowned as they continued sliding down the very deep hole. "Clearly, I must have been asleep for a very long time if such things surprise you."

"If you don't mind me asking…who are you?" Ciel asked as she grabbed onto him tighter. She wasn't entirely sure about the boy's ability to attach onto walls, but it was much better than falling at rapid speeds towards a hard ground. "I had been under the impression that a powerful warrior named Zero was trapped in this underground laboratory."

"My name is Naruto," the boy replied before furrowing his brow. "I can't remember my family name though. A lot of my memories are incredibly fuzzy. But I do know that I was sealed away as a compromise between five large nations."

"Sealed? A human can be sealed?"

"Yes, through fuinjutsu." Ciel didn't know what that was so Naruto's answer didn't exactly clarify anything. She hypothesized that it was some sort of ability akin to those he had shown already. "I was considered too powerful for any single nation to keep, you see," the boy smiled sadly, "and for the sake of peace, I had to be sealed away and be removed from the world altogether."

"That's…that's horrible…"

The boy chuckled. "There are far worse things than being exiled and being forced to wake up many years after your time…um…what is your name, miss?"

"Ciel," she supplied, realizing that she hadn't introduced herself.

"Ciel," Naruto slowly repeated, as if tasting the name in his mouth. "Well, I have plenty of questions to ask, but it'll have to wait. It looks like we're at the bottom."

Naruto took a small hop off the side of the wall and landed on the ground before setting Ciel on her feet.

"Thank you," Ciel said as she smoothed out her pink skirt. "Based on what I see here, this place is an old laboratory. We may be able to find a Trans Server, which we can use to go back to the Resistance Base."

"I'm not sure if I understood much of that, but there seems to be a passage way over there." Naruto pointed to a hole in the wall to their right. "Let's go."

After about ten minutes of running, they reached a dead end.

"How nice," Ciel said in an uncharacteristically sarcastic voice. She was sad, tired, irritated, and confused from everything that had happened in the last few hours and lost a bit of control. "This passageway is collapsed in. Shall we go back and look for another way?"

"Wait!" Ciel jumped at the sudden warning. "Get back!"

She made to move towards Naruto, but a large mechanical hand burst through the rubble and grabbed her.

"Naruto-san, run!" Ciel cried. "We must have triggered the security system of the ancient laboratory earlier when the floor collapsed earlier! Even though it's an outdated version, it's still a Golem. Its combat prowess is far superior to the Reploids you've already beaten!"

Naruto gave her a look of incredulity. "Weren't you listening at all? I was sealed away because I was too powerful. I'll save you. I promise."

* * *

He had promised to save Ciel, but he wasn't entirely sure how he would go about doing it.

To be sure, Naruto could take down the Golem with ease, but it would be something else altogether to try and beat the Golem without hurting Ciel. Unfortunately, most of his jutsu, at least the ones he recalled, were tremendously powerful area of effect attacks. Naruto didn't have a single weapon on him and because of the Golem's thick armor, normal taijutsu would be next to useless.

Rasengan was his best bet. It didn't cause particularly surgically precise damage that the Chidori could, but the damage was still limited to a relatively small area.

Naruto's eyes widened when the Golem shot out some sort of green energy beam.

"Oh crap!" Naruto dodged to the side, but felt the laser burn through part of his cloak. "Damn, that thing itself is slow, but its attacks are incredibly fast." Naruto almost face-palmed when he saw the Golem slam itself on the wall. "It doesn't seem to be particularly smart though," he muttered to himself.

That would work in his favor. It most likely wouldn't use Ciel to force Naruto to surrender.

Naruto dodged the falling rubble that had been dislodged by the Golem slamming itself on the wall. Naruto looked back at the Golem. Maybe the Reploid _wasn't_ so dumb after all; the body slamming must have been a way to dislodge the stones from the ceiling.

"Naruto-san! Its weak point is its head!" Ciel shouted out. "Aim for the top of its head."

Naruto whistled. The girl had managed to analyze her enemy while being under a stressful situation. Ciel was physically fragile, but her mind was sharp. Naruto had no doubt that she had seen her fair share of battle.

"**Tajuu Kage Bushin no Jutsu (Mass Shadow Clone Jutsu)**!"

Naruto smirked as several dozen clones popped up into existence and set his plan into motion.

* * *

"I'm not sure if I'm ever going to stop getting impressed," Ciel whispered to herself in amazement. "I've heard that Hidden Phantom could create illusory clones but…these are solid clones!"

It wasn't just the older boy's abilities that baffled her though. There was an unusual aura of security and confidence around the boy that drew her to him. With just few words, he had managed to bring hope back into her heart again. Hope that she had thrown away when she had fallen and again when she had been caught by the Golem.

Ciel watched was the solid clones charged towards the Golem and threw themselves forward. The Golem, though not recognizing that they were clones, destroyed them nonetheless. For the Golem, any moving object was immediately labeled as a hostile.

Ciel coughed as all the clones were dispelled into smoke. _So that's what he was going for._ Ciel realized. _He created a smokescreen to blind the Golem so he could get close without being detected._

When the smoke cleared, there was no one in sight.

The Golem swerved its head around from side to side looking for any potential threats. After a few seconds, satisfied that it had gotten rid of Naruto, it began to squeeze and crush Ciel.

She struggled to breathe and shifted her body around. She needed to hold on until Naruto could destroy the Golem.

"**Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)!**"

Naruto and a clone fell from the ceiling and each slammed an energy ball into the Golem: one into its head and the other into its arm.

Ciel immediately felt the Golem's grip relax and fell into Naruto's arms. "Hurry," she gasped out. "When powerful Reploids die, they release a huge burst of energy."

"You mean it's going to—"

_BOOM!_

The explosion instantly blinded them both. When her vision came back, she found herself still in Naruto's arms but now inside a strange barrier.

"**Suiton: Suiryuurou (Water Release: Water Dragon Tower)!**" Naruto muttered quietly before glaring at her. "It took quite a bit of chakra trying to activate it without any seals in an area with no water. You could have told me that it was going to explode before I destroyed it."

Ciel wilted in his arms under his harsh glare. "Ah…sorry, Naruto-san. It slipped my mind."

Naruto blinked at her for a few seconds, almost as if he was confused that she wasn't protesting and arguing back. He started laughing. "Haha. Relax! I was just joking. I don't blame you." Ciel felt a bit put out when he took that moment to set her down. She knew it was irrational of her, but she had felt secure and safe in his arms. "It's understandable that you forgot. You were a hostage, after all. All things considered, you were amazing, considering that you were able to figure out where the weak point on that bucket of bolts was. I wouldn't have been able to beat that thing so easily otherwise."

Ciel felt her face go hot. Gratitude? Pride? No. It was neither of those. Whatever she was feeling was something new altogether.

"Eep!" she managed out before covered her mouth in embarrassment. Confidence wasn't ever really her strongest trait, unless she was talking about an academic topic, but she _never _fell apart like this.

"Eh?" Naruto asked before smiling again. "Well, Ciel, and I hope you don't mind if I keep things informal," he added and Ciel shook her head, "you haven't really finished telling me about yourself."

She paused to figure out where to begin. "Well…I already told you my name. My name is Ciel. I am a scientist, more specifically a scientist in Reploid technology."

Naruto whistled in appreciation. "A scientist at that age? You must be what…fourteen? Fifteen?"

"I will be fifteen in two weeks."

Ciel wondered why she supplied that information to a near stranger even if he had saved her life. Moreover, she was confused why he had asked. It wasn't like her birthday was particularly meaningful anyway. In this world, the only thing that mattered was survival.

This boy, however, seemed to think otherwise. He was full of life and his energy and excitement began to bring out an unfamiliar feeling from within her.

"Wow, see! That's young! I thought scientists were supposed to be really old! Don't you normally have to study for decades to become a scientist?" Naruto smiled. "You must be incredibly smart!"

"Ah…well, it…it would be more accurate to say that I was designed to have high intellect," Ciel stammered, brushing away the compliment.

Naruto suddenly became serious. "Designed? What do you mean designed? Like test-tube babies created in experiments?"

"Yes," she answered. "I am a part of a group of humans called the Enlightened Ones. Before we were born, our genes were optimized so that we would function more efficiently than normal human beings."

For a second, Ciel thought that she had angered Naruto because the air around them grew thick for a split second. She even took a step back. But before she knew it, the ominous aura was gone. "So you were created? Are people being created even now?"

She shook her head. "No. As you can imagine, there were ethical issues with designing and creating humans. Furthermore, many people were unhappy that some humans were blessed with higher intellect and physical capabilities at birth. Humans were fine with Reploids being smarter, stronger, and longer-lived because Reploids were and are subordinate to humans. But creating an elite group of humans proved to be incredibly unpopular with the public. The practice of creating the Enlightened Ones stopped after one generation of ten children. I happened to be one of those children."

"I see," Naruto said with an unreadable expression. "Well, I think that's enough for now, Ciel. You mentioned something about a Trans Service earlier?"

"A Trans Server," she corrected. She walked over to a nearby computer. "I recognize the model of these computers. They were made in the last hundred years so there should be a Trans Server nearby. Trans Servers have been in use for two hundred years now." She led him to a nearby door and walked into the room. "See? We're in luck. There's a Trans Server here."

Naruto walked over and touched the apparatus. "So how do we use this thing?"

Ciel frowned. "Well, we'll have to reactivate the Trans Server somehow. Clearly, judging from the fact that some of the lights are on, there is still electricity running through the place. We could redirect the energy to the Trans Server. But it might take some time. We'll have to hope that enemies don't find us down here."

"Electricity?" Naruto asked as he held up a glowing hand charged with electrical energy. "What if I could provide the electricity?"

Ciel almost gaped at him before shaking her head. "I did promise myself that I wouldn't be surprised by anything you did anymore. You seem to be able to do just about anything, Naruto-san."

"Naruto," the boy insisted as he directed the energy in his hand to the power source of the Trans Server. "Call me Naruto. I know I'm older than you and you seem to be a proper girl, but I hate formalities."

"Very well, then…Naruto," Ciel replied with a small smile. "And once again, thank you for saving me."

* * *

**_Naruto's Jutsu List_**

**Technique:** Fuuton: Fuujin no Reppuu (Wind Release: Gale of the Wind God)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Mid to Long Range  
**Description:** The user swipes their hand in front of them causing a massive burst of pressurized air to come forth. The wind may be either blunt or sharp depending on what the user intends.

**Technique: **Katon: Hisei Endan (Fireball of the Fire Spirit)  
**Rank:** B-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Mid-Range  
**Description:** As with most fire techniques, the user takes in a deep breath and blows out a ball of fire. The flames of Hisei Endan, however, are white-hot and can burn through even metal.

**Technique: **Tajuu Kage Bunshin no Jutsu (Shadow Clone Jutsu)  
**Rank:** B-rank  
**Class:** Supportive  
**Range:** N/A  
**Description:** The user creates a clone construct using chakra. The user's chakra pool is evenly and continuously divided into all active clones. Dispelling clones returns unused chakra within the clones and immediately ends the splitting effect on the user's chakra pool.

**Technique: **Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Short Range  
**Description:** A powerful attack created without the use of hand seals. Rasengan is created through the accumulation, amplification, and containment of multiple sets of rotating chakra in the user's hand. Rasengan doesn't have much piercing power, but may cause massive internal trauma through the transmission of its rotational force into the victim's body.

**Technique:** Suiton: Suiryuurou (Water Release: Water Dragon Tower)  
**Rank:** B-rank  
**Class:** Defensive  
**Range:** Close Range  
**Description:** The user may use a nearby water source or create the water using a significant amount of chakra to form a water bubble around them to be used as a barrier or around a specific target to be used as a prison. Unlike the Water Prison Technique, however, the inside of this technique is not filled with water. The chakra that runs through the water makes it impenetrable to most physical and chakra-based attacks.


	2. Occupy Factory

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

* * *

**_Electronic Diary Entry #2-1031-2_**

_A blazing red cloak…bright golden hair…_

_…and the ability to summon a powerful sphere of energy that can destroy even a mighty Golem in a blink of an eye._

_There seemed to be nothing out of reach. Even the forces of nature themselves were tamed and subject to command…fire, water, wind, earth and lightning…_

_I had thought we were finished, especially when I realized that it wasn't Zero standing before me…that all our efforts for both peace and freedom would be for nothing…_

_Before…we had lived each day in fear…fear of Neo Arcadia…fear of death…_

_Sadness…uncertainty…fear…_

_Yes…that was how I felt…_

_…until I saw him standing before me…until I saw the Maelstrom of Hope…_

_~ Ciel_

_(adapted from Ciel's Memory: Rebirth of Zero – Mega Man Zero Audio Drama)_

* * *

"Welcome to our base, Naruto. This is a shelter for injured Reploids who are suspected of being Mavericks."

"Mavericks?" Naruto asked.

Despite the massive holes in his memory, Naruto knew he was never the smartest person around even in his own time. So now, presumably after many, _many_ centuries, Naruto was more lost than a mouse in a maze.

"Ah, yes," Ciel said with an apologetic smile. "Please forgive me. Reploids and Mavericks have existed for several hundred years now so we have become accustomed to speaking of them as if they always existed. As I have already explained to you, Reploids are the epitome of artificial intelligence."

Naruto nodded. "Yes, machines with brains, hearts, and souls."

"A somewhat simplistic interpretation, but that will do," Ciel responded diplomatically. Naruto almost rolled his eyes. If Ciel thought he was being stupid, she should just flat out say it. Naruto frowned after a moment though. The poor girl probably thought that he might abandon her if she offended him. Naruto would have to correct that thought. He did what was right, no matter how much people insulted him. "Like humans and unlike simple Robots, Reploids were purely governed by their own moral conscience. Of course, that left the door open for Reploids to eventually commit acts of violence."

"I see," Naruto said. "So these Mavericks are Reploids who have gone out of control and impulsively attack whatever they want instead of making proper ethical judgments."

"Yes. The first set of Mavericks became Mavericks because of a virus that infected them and altered their programming, making them lose the ability to empathize with others and predisposing them to become terribly violent. Eventually, a cure for the virus was found at great cost. But the…the ruler of Neo Arcadia has suddenly began claiming that Maverick outbreaks were happening once more."

"And innocent Reploids were being labeled as Mavericks," Naruto concluded. "That explains why everyone else," he gestured to the Reploids who were walking around the base, "is here. But you," he pointed to Ciel, "are human. I can sense the chakra that your body is emitting." The girl looked confused so he explained. "Chakra is the energy that runs through every organic life form." Seeing the girl nod, Naruto went on. "This Neo Arcadia isn't coming after you. So why are you here? Why are you needlessly putting yourself in danger? Couldn't you work from inside of Neo Arcadia to create reforms?"

"I…" Naruto could tell that Ciel was hesitating. "I…as an Enlightened One, I have a special empathy with Reploids. I can see and feel things that they do. Most of my closest friends were and are Reploids. So…so it…it was only right for me to come and lead them."

Naruto wasn't fully convinced, but nodded. He didn't really care to hear what her _real _reasons were; he respected the right to privacy, after all.

"Except that you don't have any fighters here." Naruto explained before Ciel could ask. "I can tell just by looking how they carry themselves, you know. Almost all of the people, um…Reploids, here are civilians."

The girl nodded. "The few combat Reploids we have are remodified civilian Reploids. Other than that, most of us are civilians who have adapted and learned how to fight. It's been almost six years since we escaped Neo Arcadia and created the Resistance. We have fought so hard to survive."

Naruto blanched at that. Six years ago? The girl must have been eight or nine years old at the time then! Whatever modifications they made to her DNA must have made her far more mature and independent as well if she was leading a group of people at that age. Naruto was still whining about being an orphan and playing in the sandbox at that age.

And it wasn't just six years of living. It was six years of enduring attacks and fighting to survive.

He looked at the blond, pink-wearing girl in a different light.

"I'm sure you have…" Naruto said in an awed tone.

Ciel nodded sadly. "Even so, we all knew that the end was coming. We didn't have the firepower to fight against the many combat Reploids, some of them B-rank and above, that Neo Arcadia had. We didn't even have the resources just to survive. Reploids are technically machines, but even they need nourishment in the form of energy crystals to survive. With Neo Arcadia hoarding all the energy, the Reploids here were eventually going to die."

"So you gambled on finding this legendary Reploid named Zero."

Naruto smirked when he saw the look of surprise. No doubt that she had thought she would have to lay everything out in detail for him.

Once upon a time, that may have been the case, but now…Naruto had more than enough experience, knowledge, and wisdom to connect seemingly unrelated facts together.

"Zero fought with the legendary X a hundred years ago. Those two saved the entire world multiple times. Zero was our last hope." Ciel clenched her fists tightly. "Most of the Reploids here had thought that Zero was nothing but a fantasy. While…while I know that Zero _did_ exist once upon a time...it appears that the thought that we could find Zero had been nothing but a pipe dream. I'm afraid their fears were proven to be correct."

"Hey there," Naruto consoled, walking over to her and putting his arm on her shoulder. Naruto frowned when he felt her tense. The girl was probably unused to any sort of contact because of the life she lived. "Maybe you didn't find this Zero, but you found me." Naruto smiled cheekily. "I like to think that I'm fairly powerful, you know."

"Please!" the girl turned to look at him with tears in her eyes. "Lend us your strength! I know you have nothing at stake here, but please help us!"

Naruto was taken aback by her intensity and took a step back. He briefly wondered if the look she had was similar to the one he had in his own eyes when deciding to put his life on the line for something he believed in. "Wait," he asked. "What about X? You said he also saved the world, right?"

"That legendary Reploid is still alive and he is trying to 'retire' all the Reploids here. X…X is the ruler of Neo Arcadia!"

Naruto figured that "retiring" was synonymous with "killing" when it came to Reploids.

"X? The hero who saved the world is trying to kill innocent Reploids?"

"Until we can find Zero, we need your help! Naruto, please help us…please…" Ciel begged. "I'll do anything…anything for you!"

Naruto narrowed his eyes almost imperceptibly. He didn't miss the way that Ciel avoided answering the question. Given how smart the girl was, it had to be done on purpose.

Still, it didn't seem like Ciel was intentionally try to mislead him. It was probably something personal. Maybe she had been close to this X or whoever. And while it was true that Naruto didn't have a stake in this battle, he was never one to sit on the sidelines and watch injustice be done. He didn't exactly know what Mavericks were, but the civilian Reploids that were around the base were definitely not Mavericks. The Resistance Reploids were mostly harmless.

Yes, it was strange that he would be fighting for machines that were alive, but if one were to be completely honest and technical, humans were essentially a collection of molecules and compounds as well. Life was life.

"Hey, calm down," Naruto said soothingly. "To be honest, I don't know what's going but I know that killing harmless and innocent people is wrong. Until you find Zero, I'll help you out, okay?"

Ciel's eyes widened. "Really?"

Naruto nodded. "Of course. I'm not one to stand by and let innocent people get killed on my watch…" he paused, "even if they're not human." Naruto laughed. _Not surprised by this development at all…I mean…I even considered animals my family, after all._

_Wait what? _Naruto froze. _Did I really have animals that close to me? How would I even begin to talk to them? Ugh…I can't remember anything!_

And yet, the feeling that he was missing something drastically important continued to weigh on Naruto. It was almost as if his mind was trying to grasp something that was so close yet so far.

"And…and…did you want anything in return?" Ciel asked carefully. "We don't have much, but…"

Naruto's eyes snapped back into focus. He looked at Ciel and gently shook his head. "I have a very strong feeling that someone very close to me would want me to ask for something very specific, but I believe that doing a good deed is its own reward."

"Thank you! Thank you so much! We won't ever forget your kindness!"

* * *

The next day, Ciel had spent quite a bit of time with Naruto. He wanted to learn more about the situation at hand and she wanted to hear stories from the past.

There weren't too many specific things that Naruto remembered. However, based on what Naruto did know, Ciel estimated that Naruto must have been asleep for around almost a thousand years. It definitely put the tall tales of people using magic during those times into perspective. Ciel had previously written those stories off as just fairy tales but seeing what Naruto could do made her reconsider.

Just what happened to make people lose those magical abilities and turn to technological advancement as an alternative?

Naruto spoke of many wars that occurred during that era. Perhaps people simply grew tired of waging wars on such fantastical scales. The fact that Naruto, a relic of a world war, was sealed without ever being woken up by his people supported that theory of war-weariness.

_Not that it did much good_, Ciel thought to herself grimly. _The war-weariness must have died down after some time. _

Ciel wasn't a historian but she knew enough to know that people found ways to hurt others no matter what era they lived in. In Naruto's era, it was through the use of chakra. In her era, it was through technology. There had been a short period of peace following the discovery of X and the creation of Reploids since the increased efficiency of the Reploids drastically decreased the need for humans to work and reduced the scramble for finite resources, but violence still managed to creep in over time, culminating in the terrible Elf Wars a century ago where 60% of all humans and 90% of all Reploids died.

"Hey Ciel," Naruto pointed at the digital map on her computer screen. "I noticed something strange but I wasn't sure how I'd ask you this."

"Yes?" She swerved in her chair to see where he had pointed.

"Well, you said that Neo Arcadia is this entire region, correct?" Naruto circled a rather large portion of the screen with his finger.

"Yes," she answered, now understanding what Naruto was getting at.

She decided to let him finish his thought, however.

"Well, why _are_ we so close to Neo Arcadia?" Naruto asked. "I can't ever say that I was a strategist, at least from what I remember, but even I know that setting up a base near enemy territory is just asking for trouble."

Ciel nodded. "It is and it's part of the reason why we're in such a predicament. Because of our relative proximity to Neo Arcadia, we constantly have to be on the lookout for Neo Arcadian patrols. But if you look carefully here," she pointed to a place opposite to where Neo Arcadia was on the map, "you can see that we're bordered by a desert."

"Why does that matter?" Naruto asked with a frown. "If anything, it looks like the Resistance Base is squeezed in between several harsh environments."

"That's the point. Outside of Neo Arcadia, there aren't very many hospitable places to stay. The desert extends for thousands of miles. And if you move north this way," she gestured up on the map, "the entire landscape is barren save for ice and snow. There are specialized Reploids that can operate in such environments, but typical civilian Reploids are only somewhat more durable than the average human. There is no way for us to live or even travel through under such harsh conditions."

This had been the terrible consequence of the Elf Wars. Because of fallout from the weapons of mass destruction used in the war, nature was almost completely destroyed elsewhere on the planet.

Naruto winced. "So you're basically saying that you _can't_ escape too far even if you wanted to because you can't live anywhere else…"

"More or less correct. There _are_ habitable places thousands of miles away, but we have no means of getting there without getting detected by Neo Arcadian forces. Neo Arcadia monitors the entire airspace here. We can send slow and low-flying transport planes out, but any higher up, planes will get shot down."

"What about those Trans Servers? Can't you use that technology to transfer people over large distances?"

"Again, that's only if we have the coordinates. Moreover, Trans Servers, while useful, are limited in their range. We can only transfer people a few hundred miles at the most. And those are only with state-of-the-art Trans Servers, which we do not have."

"Whew…" Naruto muttered. "And so you've been staying _here _for six years?"

Ciel shook her head. "We were on the move for several years. It was really a stroke of luck that allowed us to find this place."

"No," Naruto said with a small smile, "it wasn't just luck. I'm sure determination and will had quite a lot to do with it."

"Naruto…" Ciel felt her heart start to race and face slowly flush. She didn't quite understand why, however. She did know that as a human girl, her body would respond in certain physiological ways whenever she got near human boys, especially attractive ones, but…this was considerably more than what she had predicted.

This was far more emotional.

Naruto just seemed to have a strange effect on her.

"No, I'm serious," Naruto replied earnestly as he met her eyes. "Even during my time when it was almost normal for children to go into battle, not many would have been able to do what you've done here. And I don't care what you claim about your intellect and genetics; you're still a young girl."

Ciel felt her breath catch in her throat as she looked into his eyes. Naruto's words didn't say it, but she could tell that he too, like her, had felt such huge burden on his shoulder before at a far too young age. She didn't have any special empathic connection with humans, but she still could almost _feel_ the empathy in the air and the sorrow and pity Naruto was feeling for her sake.

It was almost as if he was saying he'd share her burden with her.

"I…" she whispered as she began to tear up. For six years, she had steel herself and tried to keep her heart as strong as possible. But for some reason, this boy from the past just made her feel so vulnerable. "I just want peace…"

Naruto nodded with distant eyes, as if he were remembering something in the past, before his eyes focused like lasers again and bore into her own.

"So do I, Ciel…so do I."

* * *

Over the next few days, Naruto went on various small missions for Ciel and the Resistance. Ciel must have been trying to get him used to battle before sending him on a large mission because the assignments she had sent him on were ridiculously easy. For the most part, he had an easier time on all the missions than he did when he first escorted Ciel out of the abandoned laboratory & shrine he had been sleeping in.

Currently the mission he was to take over an abandoned factory. The factory itself was some ways away from the base—enough that taking over the factory wouldn't give away the position of their base—but still close enough that they could incorporate it into their infrastructure and use it to create badly needed tools, such as weapons and machines.

"Neo Arcadia must be a joke," Naruto grumbled to himself as he slashed through Pantheon after Pantheon in the area with custom-made energy kunai. "There hasn't been a single decent enemy out here." He threw an energy shuriken, something that Cerveau had made for him based on the technology of the day, which pierced the shield of a Barrier Counter and made the flying Reploid explode.

The solid energy spikes on his shuriken and the energy blade on his kunai didn't absorb chakra at all, but they were definitely significant upgrades over metal weapons and easily pierced through things that even metal blades couldn't. In fact, Naruto suspected that they were sharper and had greater penetration power than wind-coated metal weapons.

It was a shame he couldn't add chakra to augment those characteristics even more. He found that he couldn't even clone them with variations of the shadow clone technique.

Naruto had heard that Zero's signature weapon had been a sword made out of similar solid energy and asked for his own set of solid energy weapons. Naruto was strong but he wasn't so arrogant as to think that he couldn't get stronger from the new technology that the future had.

"I didn't need your help, Naruto-san."

Naruto rolled his eyes and jumped away from the pompous Reploid who had addressed him. It had been Colbor, a low-end combat Reploid. Colbor had quite an interesting background. He was originally slated to be one of the degenerate Pantheons, but the manufacturing plant made an error and had given him far more computing power than necessary along with a civilian Reploid exterior to an Pantheon interior.

In short, Colbor was a smarter Pantheon that looked like a civilian Reploid.

_Although…given how dumb those blue Pantheons are…that's not much of a compliment._ Naruto thought with some disdain.

Colbor had made it known from the beginning that he had no intention on relying on Naruto. In his opinion, Naruto, someone who had no stake in the battle, wasn't someone the Resistance could trust. Furthermore, Colbor had doubts about how strong a human could be.

As Naruto hurled several more shuriken to destroy more Barrier Counters, Naruto briefly wondered if Ciel had put Naruto and Colbor's squad on a mission together to build up trust.

Naruto had to hand it to the pretty leader of the Resistance. For the most part, her plan was working. Naruto jumped over a female Reploid to slash several Hoppiders that had appeared from behind a corner. He saw her give him a look of gratitude before he body flickered away. But Colbor proved to be idiotically stubborn and tried to refuse almost any sort of help to his detriment.

After about an hour, they finally cleared out all the enemies in the factory and reached the central power room.

"Alright," Colbor announced before Naruto could stop him. "One more room to take. Follow me."

"Wait," Naruto cried out. In his opinion, the factory takeover had gone _too _smoothly. He couldn't _sense _these mechanical Reploids, but he could still sense danger. And there was something wrong.

Naruto was still suspicious that there were more enemies lying around. He wouldn't be surprised if there was a powerful Reploid waiting to take potshots at them the moment they let their guards down.

Colbor paid him no heed and knocked the door down with a body slam.

"Colbor-taichou!" several of the Reploids in the squad cried out as Colbor quickly took a buster shot to the leg.

Groaning, Naruto rushed to eliminate the Securipider that had dropped near Colbor with an energy kunai. "Idiot," Naruto scolded as the sliced pieces of the Securipider fell around him. "Don't push yourself too hard in an effort to prove yourself. We're all allies here."

"Speak for yourself," Colbor hissed while grimacing in pain.

Naruto ignored him and turned to one of the Reploids in the squad. "Oyie-san," Naruto addressed the female Reploid he had saved ealier, "please contact Ciel and notify her that you and Colbor-san will be returning immediately via Trans Server."

"Don't listen to him," Colbor groaned out stubbornly. "I'm in charge here!"

Naruto opened his mouth to retort but suddenly the alarms started blaring in the factory.

"Watch out," Naruto shouted as he tackled one of the Reploids to the ground. If his memory served him correctly, the Reploid's name was Dande. He was the youngest of the group and had recently joined the combat group.

A large energy ball charged with lightning sailed right above where the two of them had been a second prior.

"Our sensors are going haywire!" Faucon, another young Reploid and one of the seven Reploids on the mission with Naruto and Colbor cried out. "It must be a powerful C-rank Reploid or higher."

"Tch," Naruto muttered. This mission had gone south in the span of a minute since Colbor made the boneheaded move to break down the door to the most important room in the building without checking for security systems. "I don't give a damn about what you think Colbor so I'm taking over. All of you…" Naruto gestured to all the Reploids, "get the hell out of here. Go back to the entrance and once you get there, call Ciel to transfer you out."

"What about you, Naruto-san?" Dande asked in a nervous tone. "Aren't you coming with us?"

Just then, a gargantuan snowflake-like Reploid dropped from the ceiling.

"Just get the hell out of here!" Naruto shouted. "Worry about yourselves!"

They apparently didn't need to be told after they saw the Reploid and ran off as fast as they could while carrying Colbor.

**"Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Guard Orotic shall destroy all intruders!"**

Naruto raised an eyebrow as everyone disappeared from sight. "Guard Orotic? That's your name?" Naruto smirked as he took out several energy shuriken. "Well, my name is Naruto and I don't feel like being destroyed today."

* * *

"Where's Naruto?" Ciel almost demanded as she saw Team Colbor materialize back inside the Trans Server. She had immediately activated the Trans Server and linked it to Team Colbor's location once she heard the request to pull back. Easily understanding that this was an emergency situation, she figure she could hear the report once the squad got back.

She hadn't expected them to come back one person short, however.

"Probably dead," Colbor growled out with clenched teeth as he kept pressure on his wound.

Ciel didn't even notice that Colbor was wounded because she suddenly felt her heart stop. _Dead? Impossible! Naruto…he's…he's too strong for that, right? This was supposed to be an easy mission!_

"Colbor-taichou!" the other Reploids shouted out in indignation.

"What was that for?! Naruto-san isn't dead!"

Ciel's head turned so fast that she might have gotten whiplash. Taking a deep breath, she looked at the youngest member on the team who had claimed that Naruto wasn't dead. "Dande-kun, explain."

"Colbor-taichou accidentally set off the security systems when he broke the door to the power room _against_ Naruto-san's advice," the young Reploid reported, apparently not even caring that Colbor was staring daggers at him. "Colbor-taichou was then injured by a Neo Arcadian Reploid. Naruto-san killed that particular Reploid and then ordered us to return, but Colbor-taichou rescinded that order. After that, we then encountered a high level combat Reploid."

Ciel did not like where this was going. She looked somberly at the other members of Team Colbor. "What did your scanners say about its power level?"

Faucon, a young burly Reploid, stepped forward. "C-rank…or possibly even higher."

Ciel tightened her hands into fists. A C-rank combat Reploid was far stronger than what she would have liked.

"So Naruto stayed behind to fight and buy you time to escape…" she whispered out, stating the obvious.

All of them except Colbor nodded.

Ciel sighed. She had figured as much as soon as she realized where Dande's report had been going.

Even in the few days she had spent with Naruto, Ciel realized that Naruto had a heart for others. He would go out of his way to make others feel safe and happy. He took time to talk to the children, listen to the elderly, and learn the history behind all the members of the Resistance. There were a few members of the Resistance, like Colbor, who hadn't accepted Naruto immediately, but for the most part, everyone had started to consider Naruto as a comrade, especially after he started going on missions for them.

He wasn't the legendary Zero that they had been expecting, but Naruto was still a new friend and comrade nonetheless.

"Naruto-san will be fine!" Dande declared confidently. "I've never seen anyone move as quickly as he does. He's stronger than all of us think, Ciel-san. Remember? You said he even took down a Golem for you!"

Ciel didn't respond. Yes, Naruto took down a Golem, which was more or less around C-rank, but that particular Golem was a hundred years old and wouldn't be a C-rank by modern standards.

"Um…Ciel-san?"

She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Ciel couldn't obsess about Naruto right now; not when there were people around watching her. Her mind turned to more immediate matters.

Fixing Colbor with a disappointed look for his bitterness towards Naruto, she gave out several orders. "Take Colbor-taichou to the infirmary. If the rest of you aren't injured, then take the rest of the day off."

All the members of Team Colbor nodded and slowly walked to the door.

"What about you, Ciel-san?" Dande called out from the entrance to the room when he saw that she wasn't going to leave with them.

"I'm going to wait for Naruto."

* * *

"**Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)! Rasengan! Rasengan! Rasengan!**"

Naruto slammed yet another Rasengan on the surprisingly sturdy remains of the Reploid he had just killed.

The battle against Guard Orotic hadn't been the easiest Naruto had ever been in, but it hadn't been the hardest either. It was, however, probably one of his more annoying battles.

Naruto had spent several minutes bombarding the metal snowflake with Rasengans from his shadow clones, but had been annoyed when wires and machines came out seemingly out of nowhere to repair the arms that he had destroyed. So Naruto had to spend another few minutes dodging fire, ice, lightning, and buster bullets while he repeated the entire process. Unfortunately, the entire factory operation must have been set to create spare parts for the damn Reploid and it took half-an-hour before the Reploid ran out of arms to protect its core with.

Eventually though, Naruto won that battle of attrition and managed to land a Rasengan straight into the core. Unlike the situation with the Golem, Guard Orotic didn't die in a large explosion. The resulting "explosion," if it could be called that, had been more like a small sputter of released energy. Nothing outside the power room had been damaged.

But because he had taken what Ciel had to say to heart—that powerful Reploids _always_ died in an explosion—Naruto approached the dead Reploid in a cautious manner before then began tearing it down into as many pieces as he could to make sure it stayed dead. He was still dismantling the metallic body of the snowflake-like Reploid in case it had some form of auto-repair mechanism for its core like it did for its arms.

Reploids didn't have chakra so Naruto had no reliable way of knowing if they were truly dead. He'd be damned if he made a mistake like letting the enemy survive to report his existence and any accurate estimation of his power to the higher-ups of Neo Arcadia.

Yes, that was definitely the reason.

Naruto's continued trampling of the Reploid remains had absolutely _nothing _to do with the fact that Naruto was still confused and slightly freaked out by this whole idea of machines being alive. And his destructive actions were most certainly not related to the scary dreams he had the previous night where his kunai and shuriken somehow came to life and tried to kill him.

Naruto gave one last stomp on the Reploid remains for good measure before looking at the thousands of metal pieces scattered across the floor of the room.

Naruto shrugged as he took out a storage scroll.

And besides, who knew? Maybe Cerveau or whatever the engineer's name was had use for scrap metal.

* * *

"Man," Ciel heard Naruto yawn as he teleported back to the base around half-an-hour after the others had come, "Scavenging for spare parts is thirsty work. I should be getting paid in gold for this."

Ciel let out a sigh of relief when she saw Naruto step out of the Trans Server. "You're back," she gasped out, just realizing that she had been holding her breath for much of the time she had been waiting. Naruto hadn't called at all and must have used a Trans Server that had been inside the factory to make his return trip.

Naruto gave her a confused look. "Of course I'm back. Why wouldn't I be?"

Ciel didn't know if Naruto was intentionally playing dumb or if he was just that uninformed and unimpressed about the strength of his enemy. The latter, if true, had particularly frightening implications.

"Team Colbor told me that you were fighting a powerful enemy."

"Really?" Naruto asked mildly, making a show of looking confused by scratching his head. "I just told them to go back while I scavenged around for scrap metal that we could use. Most of the weapons I use are partially made of metal and I wanted to at least earn my keep. It wouldn't be fair to keep mooching off of your funds for my weapons. See?"

Ciel watched in slight irritation as Naruto took out of his strange scrolls and instantly flooded the entire floor of the Trans Server room with metal pieces of various sizes.

She could immediately tell, however, that the "scrap metal" was actually pieces of Reploid armor.

Moreover, from Naruto's overly light-hearted tone, Ciel _knew_ he was lying—he wasn't doing a good job of it—but at the same time, Naruto didn't have a single scratch on him to suggest he had been in battle. His black outfit lined with orange didn't have a single speck of dust on it and his red cape with its black flame design was as flashy as ever.

"Yes…scavenging for scrap metal, indeed," she said slowly, decided to play along. If she thought about it from a different perspective, it was rather sweet of Naruto to lie to keep her from worrying. And since he wasn't injured in the least, Ciel really didn't have any true cause for concern. "You might want to take some of that to Doigt when you have time. Cerveau's rather busy this week with a priority project and Doigt is the one who actually builds most of the things that Cerveau designs."

"Will do!" Naruto said cheerfully.

With that, Ciel walked out of the room shaking her head, not knowing whether to be annoyed, impressed, or pleased.

* * *

The next day, Naruto found himself sitting on a ledge in the room that acted as mission control. It didn't have any special gadgets or devices, but it was the room closest to Ciel's room and laboratory and everyone in the Resistance considered it an "official" place.

Because no one was allowed to go outside, the ledge had become Naruto's place to meditate. He didn't know why he meditated, but instinctively felt that it was the best way to train at the moment.

_Although how meditation is actually training, I have no idea, _Naruto thought. _I can understand that meditation improves focus and would help right before a battle, but why do I have this urge to constantly meditate?_

After several hours of drawing blanks in his mind, Naruto decided to think about the issues he had information on instead, particularly about a gentle and very pretty girl who was doing some kind of research experiment in her laboratory next door.

He could see why people would follow her. The girl exuded kindness and gentleness and it was crystal clear that she genuinely wanted peace between Reploids and humans. Naruto's shinobi training warned him that it wasn't wise to trust someone so openly when he knew very little about the person, but Naruto's innate instincts said otherwise. And Naruto always went with his instincts.

Naruto didn't remember too much about the past aside from general knowledge. But he vaguely knew that he had participated in a war, lost many friends, and had desperately wanted peace.

A certain phrase kept repeating itself in his mind. _Breaking the cycle of hatred…_

Naruto didn't know what that phrase exactly meant, but he did know that he sacrificed himself for the sake of world peace. Perhaps the phrase had been a reference to his sacrifice. Regardless, his fiery passion for peace and disdain for evil was still strong in his heart and Ciel's equally resilient determination to bring _true_ peace to the Reploid was what drew him to her and to her cause.

That and Naruto didn't like the sound of some of the stuff Neo Arcadia was doing.

Yes, forced retirement of Mavericks _would _be right…except Neo Arcadia seemed to retire Reploids on a fixed schedule and in consistent numbers. It seemed highly unlikely that Maverick outbreaks happened at such regular intervals, producing exactly the same number of Mavericks each time. Then there was martial law under X, forbidding anyone to say anything negative about Neo Arcadia. To Naruto, that smelled very much like repression and a way to dampen any sort of dissent. And worst of all, in Naruto's opinion at least, there were records of experimentation on human children. Yes, Ciel had turned out perfectly fine, but playing God was well outside the boundaries of moral law. Naruto vaguely remembered that one of his sworn enemies dabbled in human experimentation as well and it left a bad taste in his mouth.

"Naruto-san?"

Naruto opened a single eye to look at the two Reploids who had addressed him. One was a skinny Reploid with a helmet-visor apparatus and the other one was a burly human-like Reploid. Both of them looked relatively young as far as Reploids went.

"Yes?" Naruto wracked his brains for the names. "Dande and Faucon…right? From Team Colbor…"

"Yes! You remembered our names!" the one with the visor, Dande, said excitedly.

Naruto didn't see what the big deal was—he wasn't a celebrity or anything like that—but nodded nonetheless. "I figured if I'm going to be working around here, I might as well get to know everyone. It'll probably help me endear myself to the Reploids here as well."

Faucon and Dande exchanged looks. Naruto saw that they understood the hidden meaning behind Naruto's words. He, as well as they, knew that there were people in the Resistance who still viewed Naruto with suspicion.

"Well," Naruto asked, now standing up and joining them down on the lower level of mission control. "What brings the two of you here?"

Naruto watched with curiosity and amusement, as the two of them seemed to mull things over by themselves. The two of them suddenly dropped to their knees and bowed their heads.

"Naruto-san," Faucon spoke for the both of them. "We want you to train us."

"Eh?!" Naruto blinked several times in shock. "Training?! Why do you want training? And why me?! Don't you have training tips or whatever you call it?"

Dande lifted his head up. "There are training protocols, but those were designed for combat Reploids. We're civilian Reploids who don't have the specs to fight in the normal way. We'll never get strong using normal methods."

"You saw how badly our mission could have ended yesterday, Naruto-san," Faucon added. "We're weak and terribly so. Among the ones who are still alive, Colbor-taichou is considered the strongest in the Resistance and that was because his body was designed for combat in the first place. And even someone like him can't hold a candle to you."

Naruto groaned. He had spent the day meditating to get _rid _of a headache and now these two young Reploids just undid all his work. "So you think just because I fight in a different way, you could pick some things up from me?" Naruto shook his head before they could even respond. "Nope, I refuse."

"But Naruto-san!" Dande protested. "We'll train hard! We promise!"

Naruto sighed. "Look. I use something called chakra to enhance my body. It's a form of energy that exists inside of all livi…I mean _organic_," Naruto was careful about his words, "forms of life. You Reploids don't have it."

"It doesn't have to be your unique abilities!" Faucon continued to press. "Dande and I hadn't even planned on learning those. We just want to learn how to _fight_. We've seen the look in your eyes and how you move in battle. You've seen more battle than all of us in the Resistance combined. If you can get us to a place where even someone like Colbor-taichou is, we would be eternally grateful."

"What about your specs, as you put it?" Naruto argued back. "You said that your specs don't allow you to fight at a high level. Ciel and Cerveau told me that they performed some modification on you recruits, but clearly, those modifications don't increase your potential that much. What do you think _I _can do when everyone has failed?"

Despite his words, Naruto was becoming more and more intrigued. The two Reploids were showing both earnestness and tenacity in spades and those qualities resonated with Naruto. Naruto also remembered that he too once had begged multiple teachers, whose names he didn't remember, to train him in vain. As long as he had the time and the two Reploids had the will, Naruto wasn't going to turn them down.

"Everyone in the world is told that Reploid potential vastly exceeds human potential. Yet here you are, Naruto-san, a living testament to how false that teaching was," Dande said with fervor. "I refuse to believe that I am limited by my specifications."

"That goes for me as well, Naruto-san," Faucon said, "You don't have to find a way to help us overcome our limitations; we'll do that for ourselves. However, we do want to learn and benefit from your experience and knowledge."

Naruto smiled. "Well, I can't say no in the face of such determination." His grin turned evil as he raised his killing intent, which somehow seemed to affect even Reploids. "But don't hold if against me if my training kills you."

The two Reploids shivered but nodded. "Yes!" They affirmed.

Naruto released his killing intent and with some sense of nostalgia said, "Okay! Let's get started then! Tell me about yourselves. Your likes, dislikes, dreams, and stuff like that."

* * *

"Training? For Dande-kun and Faucon-kun?"

"Yes, training," Naruto nodded. "I figured I might as well get your permission since you're the leader around here."

Ciel thought for a second. Reploid power and combat abilities were set in stone at creation and it wasn't likely that Naruto could do much to improve anyone's fighting strength.

She shook her head sadly. "Sorry, Naruto. I'm afraid you'll be wasting your time."

Naruto frowned. "Why?"

She explained. "Reploids certainly have a higher base power than humans and like humans, have the capacity to learn over the years. However, they just aren't all that adaptable. Much of what Reploids are capable are decided before they are made."

"Hm…" Naruto furrowed his brow. "I have a question actually. It's a bit off-topic though."

"Yes?" Ciel looked at him curiously.

"How do Reploids age? I heard the old guy Andrew talking about how he had to make his body and mind older to match the human woman he loved, but he also talked about Reploid children."

Ciel shook her head, knowing what Naruto was trying to say. "It's not the same. Reploids _do _gain experience over the years and their bodies do mature, but it's not in the same way that humans mature." She decided to use the Reploids Naruto intended to train as examples. "Dande-kun and Faucon-kun are young Reploids, having been made only twelve or thirteen years ago. To make Reploids more human-like, their bodies were set by scientists and designers to grow physically as they gained experience at the same rate as a human would. However, their growth patterns and adult sizes were all preset according to certain specifications before they were made. The materials needed for their growth were already inside their bodies as well."

"So any changes that Reploids undergo are purely to make them more human-like?"

She nodded. "Much of Reploid research involves making Reploids as human as possible…civilian Reploids, at least," she added. "There are combat Reploids only a year old that act, function, and look old and mature."

"Sounds almost useless," Naruto commented.

Ciel smiled sadly. "Perhaps, but there has been research done showing that humans are considerably more accepting of Reploids that look and behave like humans. It was done for the Reploids' sake."

The boy's eyes widened. "I see." His eyes soon hardened, however. "Tell me, Ciel," he asked. "Why are you fighting?"

She looked at him in confusion. "B…b…because! What Neo Arcadia is doing is unjust! How could I _not _fight?"

Naruto laughed harshly. "Well, you're outnumbered, the Reploids you have here are innately worse at combat…so how could you hope to win?"

She froze at that. She never really did consider that. "I…I…" she stammered.

"You instinctively must have known this because you set out to find Zero, who presumably has higher innate combat abilities than anyone here," Naruto continued. "But even then, you're horribly outnumbered by the enemy. There's no way you could win. Neo Arcadia can continue to create more combat Reploids. It's a battle of numbers that just gets worse and worse. So is the best you're hoping for a delay? Are you just trying to extra time for the Reploids here so that they can suffer for several more years before finally being retired?"

"N…no," she shook her head. "No. I…I really want permanent peace."

Naruto smiled gently. "What was it…? Specifications, you said?" Naruto laughed. "Please…nothing in this world is completely governed by specifications." Ciel could only stare back as Naruto looked straight at her. "Determination, drive, desire…those are things that can't be measured by numbers."

"I…I…I guess you're right, Naruto," Ciel sighed, relenting. She looked down. It _would _be hypocritical of her to say that training Reploids was a waste of time when by that same logic, this entire fight against Neo Arcadia was a waste of time. "Do as you will then."

Her eyes widened when Naruto grabbed her shoulders. She felt her face flushing _again_. Why did Naruto have such an effect on her?!

"Don't look so down. I was trying to cheer you up. Think of it this way. I believe you can win this war," Naruto said cheerfully. "I also believe that there's more to Reploids than just their specifications. Given how much you care for Reploids, I know we're in agreement on this."

She nodded, but couldn't say anything. It was almost as if her body and brain had shut down from being too close to Naruto.

Naruto didn't seem to notice. "So give me the two idiots and I'll make them into champions."

* * *

**Author's Note: I'm sorry there wasn't a _true _battle scene in this chapter. I wanted to focus more on laying the groundwork for relationships between Naruto and the various Resistance members. Given the vast number of enemies in the Mega Man Zero series, I had to be choosy about which battles I wanted to write in detail. Otherwise, it'd be a battle, or even two, every single chapter and that becomes old really quickly. Also, there will undoubtedly be some Mega Man Zero purists who might say that the first enemy is actually Aztec Falcon instead of Guard Orotic. I know, but I decided to change it for plot purposes. **

**Reviews will be appreciated.**


	3. Reploid Disposal Center

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

* * *

**_Dreams about the Past_**

_"Uzumaki Naruto, the Fire Daimyo has summoned you and the Konoha representatives here today to discuss the delicate issue of how to deal with the aftermath of the Fourth Great Shinobi War," the spokesman for the Fire Daimyo declared._

_To be honest, Naruto wasn't in the mood to discuss anything, especially with nobles who had done nothing but hide behind ninjas and civilians._

_The war had been won, but many of his mentors and friends had died. Tsunade, Kakashi, Gaara, Shikamaru, Sasuke, Sakura…to name a few._

_Over the last few months, Naruto had thrown himself into his training to assuage his guilt. Perhaps if he had been stronger, his dear loved ones wouldn't have had to die. And of course, the constant training kept him distracted. Training with over five hundred clones each day, Naruto clawed his way up, higher and higher to the heights that had never been achieved by shinobi._

_If only he hadn't been such an idiot and had done this earlier…_

_"Yes?" Naruto asked in a flat tone, keeping the irritation in his voice to a minimum._

_"Effective immediately, you will be anointed as the Rokudaime Hokage!"_

_Naruto's eyes widened slightly, but he immediately narrowed them again and bowed. "Thank you. It is an honor to be considered, but I will have to refuse."_

_In the past, Naruto would have been elated to achieve his childhood dream, but the cost had been too high for Naruto to rejoice too much now. _

_"This isn't a request, Naruto-kun," the Fire Daimyo spoke for the first time as everyone in the room became quiet._

_Naruto looked at the noble in confusion. "What do you mean? How can you force me to be the leader of the village?"_

_"Naruto…" Homura warned from where he sat._

_But Naruto hadn't meant any disrespect in that particular question. He was genuinely curious as to what led to this development._

_"The fragile peace that we desperately fought and spilt blood for is being threatened once more," the Fire Daimyo sighed dramatically. _

_Naruto looked at the man angrily. How dare the pompous noble claim that he suffered through the war? Naruto had to take a few deep breaths to calm down._

_The spokesperson translated. "The other nations and hidden villages appear to be mobilizing in an effort to move against us."_

_"Impossible!" Naruto cried. "Everyone fought together. We were all comrades!"_

_He expected this from civilian nobles who knew nothing about the sacrifices they had to make during the war, but not from the Tsuchikage, Raikage, and the Mizukage. _

_"Naïve!" Homura thundered. "Naruto, no matter how much goodwill you have for others and others have for you, others may not feel the same! Don't assume that everyone is as pure-hearted as you are!"_

_"Well then…is it greed? You're saying that they're attacking us because of money and land after a war in which we fought for peace and survival?" Naruto asked incredulously. "What use is money when half the world is dead? There isn't a scarcity of resources at all! Or are you saying that they are motivated by fear? They have nothing to worry about when the entire world is sick of war! We have no reason to attack them. None of these this is making any sense."_

_Koharu clicked her tongue. "Why Hiruzen and Tsunade favored you so, I will never understand."_

_Naruto growled. This whole meeting was testing his patience already and this old hag was just making it worse. "Get to the point…"_

_"It may be the case that we don't want war, Naruto-kun," the Fire Daimyo said although he didn't sound too convincing on the matter. The man slowly fanned himself. "The other countries don't believe that. They simply believe we are biding our time to regain our strength. It's fear of what we could become in the future, not fear of what we are now."_

_"There have been reports leaked to other villages that you are training incessantly. They fear that this is a sign that Konoha may be preparing for war," Homura added. "With all the bijuu sealed in the Gedo Mazo and all the previous Jinchuuriki dead, you are the undisputedly strongest shinobi alive."_

_Naruto didn't even feel a small bit of pride at that. There was no glory in being the strongest when that strength didn't translate into results._

_"The other villages and nations will not stand for this. Even without the Kyuubi inside of you, you still have portions of the Kyuubi's power, making you the only human weapon in the Elemental Nations. With your vaunted Sage Mode and the other abilities you gained through and after the war, you have become the target of fear and suspicion."_

_Naruto's jaw dropped. "You're telling me that I'm the cause of this war?"_

_"Essentially correct," Koharu answered. "Handing you over to any other village is out of the question, so it is time for Konoha to make a bold statement and set you on the seat of power. If Konoha and the Land of Fire go to war against the other villages and nations, you must be at the front lines upholding the Will of Fire!"_

_There was a pregnant pause in the room before the Fire Daimyo spoke._

_"Arise, Rokudaime Hokage!" _

* * *

Naruto woke up with a jolt.

The details of his dream were rapidly fading away but Naruto was sure his dream had been about his village.

His dream was an encouraging sign that his memories were clearly in his mind, but was frustrating at the same time because it proved that Naruto didn't have complete access to those memories for whatever reason.

Sighing deeply, Naruto tossed and turned in his bed in a futile attempt to go back to sleep.

After several minutes he gave up and got out of bed.

After washing up and changing, he took the lift to the floor with the Trans Server. Naruto didn't even bother to check the coordinates for the Trans Server. All he knew was that he had to get out.

Naruto arrived on top of a small, forested cliff. The vegetation around seemed to be mostly organic but some of the plants did show signs of modifications. The modified plants appeared to be some sort of techno-organic form of life. He couldn't feel nature chakra at all to confirm if they were alive or not, but nature chakra was more or less undetectable by even the most skilled of sensors.

To his shock he found Ciel sitting on a rock looking at the rising sun.

"Ciel?"

"Eep!" The girl jumped up in fright and turned around.

Naruto just stared blankly at the girl, whose face was rapidly turning red.

"What are you doing out here?" Naruto finally asked, after a minute of just staring at the pink-wearing girl. She had seemed like someone who always followed the rules to the letter so to see her outside of the base in what was more or less an unauthorized personal trip was a surprise.

"I should have figured you would eventually catch me on one of my outings," she murmured, as she turned around and looked out in the distance where the sun was beginning to rise. "Seeing how you came here without even thinking about how you were going to go back, you're quite the curious and adventurous type, aren't you?"

"I have a portable Trans Server that I could use to go back and I didn't feel like putting up the effort in trying to sneak past the guards you have up around the base to get some fresh air," Naruto explained as he walked to her and sat down on the large stone next to her. Naruto took in the sight of the trees, the rocks, the clouds, and the brilliant sun peaking over the far mountains. "It's beautiful…"

"I often come here when I have a lot on my mind," the girl commented in a soft tone, explaining _why _she was there. "Reploids can appreciate the beauty of nature, but it isn't quite essential for them as it is for humans."

"This doesn't seem like you at all. Isn't it dangerous to be outside the base like this, especially without any escorts?" Naruto wasn't really scolding her. He understood her feelings perfectly. After all, he too had left the base to get some fresh air. Living underground for nearly two weeks without end made him claustrophobic. The girl had done it for years. She must have been going crazy.

She didn't answer his question directly.

"This place is called Area Zero, the only area outside of Neo Arcadia that can sustain human life."

"I thought life was impossible outside Neo Arcadia," Naruto said slowly.

The girl nodded absentmindedly. "For the most part, it is. Area Zero is more like a pet project of Neo Arcadia to try to repair the planet; it's one of the few areas where Neo Arcadia has succeeded in restoring nature to its original state. But because of that, Neo Arcadia combs this place almost every week and destroys anything that might even harm the ecosystem."

Naruto frowned. "If this area was under heavy surveillance, then how did you find this area in the first place? You can't just teleport yourself wherever you want to go, right? You have to have coordinates and a warp zone or Trans Server…"

The girl smiled lightly. "It's not hard to obtain coordinates when you're part of the government, Naruto. I told you that I was special among humans. With my abilities, I rose within the ranks of Neo Arcadia really quickly. You might even say that I _was _Neo Arcadia."

Naruto just remained silent as Ciel sighed and went on. "There's no warp zone here but…I visited this place during a scouting mission in the early years of the Resistance when we were looking for places to live and hid a portable Trans Server in the ground beneath that tree over there. Unfortunately, because of the heavy attention Neo Arcadia gives to this place, this place wasn't any good for a hideout," she added wistfully. "When I was young, I was much bolder and didn't fully think of the ramifications of my actions, so I always used to do things like running away from the Resistance Base to spend time out here alone without anyone finding out. I grew wiser and more cautious over the years, but I could never seem to let this particular habit of mine go completely." Ciel sighed and looked up where the brightest stars were still visible. "Does it make me a bad person that I'm playing with fire like this? So many friends paid with their blood so that I may be here today, yet I'm squandering their sacrifice by indulging myself."

"Who knows?" Naruto answered noncommittally. "I'm not an expert on moral law. Aren't you supposed to be the smart one?"

Truth be told, Naruto had often felt the same way in the past. He always considered it much easier to give than to receive. Receiving, especially something as precious as the sacrificial life of a comrade, often felt like a burden.

The girl let out a small laugh even if Naruto's joke had fallen flat.

"In any case, what brings you here at this hour, Naruto? Half the Resistance is convinced that you're stalking me, but surely you wouldn't give up sleep just to follow me around, would you?"

Again, Naruto noticed that she was trying to pass off her own embarrassment of having been caught by teasing him. Naruto mentally smirked at her amateur move. When he was younger, he might have scowled and vehemently denied that he was doing such a thing all the while forgetting about the situation. He was not _that _dumb anymore. War made him grow up and quickly, too.

"I want to clear my head. You see, I had a dream about my past," Naruto answered honestly while keeping his composure. "Like with most dreams, I forgot a lot of the details immediately after I woke up, but I still remember more than enough."

"Not pleasant dreams?" Ciel said hesitantly. Naruto could tell she was curious about his past, but was intentionally holding back from asking too many questions out of respect for his privacy.

Naruto let out a hoarse laugh. "I can't ever remember having pleasant dreams from the day I became a ninja and I don't think it has to do with my current memory loss." He chose to lie down on his back on the large rock and look up as he spoke. "I had hoped that things would change for the better in this world, but it seems that the cost of life is pain. That hasn't seemed to have changed even after a thousand years."

Naruto was fully taking advantage of Ciel's generosity of not prying by being intentionally vague about his dream. He didn't bother telling her any of the specific details that he _did_ remember. The details were irrelevant at this point and Naruto wasn't completely comfortable revealing certain things about himself just yet.

Ciel shook her head. "No, I suppose it hasn't. The scientist in me rationalizes it by saying that life is a struggle for finite resources. The more life there is, the scarcer the resources become. But that's just a nice way of saying that people are inherently greedy, distrusting, and fearful of others."

Naruto chuckled darkly. "Those specific words actually sound very familiar. In fact, I was always scolded for being too naïve and trusting. No matter how many bad things happened, I kept choosing to see only the best in others and hoping that things would work out. Sometimes they did, but more often, they didn't. But what can I say? I'm an idealist."

Ciel nodded. "That much is evident. You wouldn't be helping us if you weren't." Ciel turned and smiled brightly at him although Naruto realized it was partially forced. "I think that's a good thing though, Naruto."

There was a long pause between them. Neither of them said anything for several minutes and just took comfort in the other's presence.

Ciel began, "I'm here actually because—"

Naruto answered for her. "Guilt." Naruto felt the girl tensing next to him. "Am I wrong?" The girl didn't answer. "The air itself is my playground, Ciel. I can sense my environment through small changes in the wind. There are gravestones and a small energy knife about thirty feet behind us."

Ciel didn't deny it. The girl sniffled and let a few tears drop. "I lost so many comrades, Naruto…and…and…"

He nodded. "You're afraid to lose another one." The real reason why Ciel was here became crystal clear to him all of a sudden. Naruto decided to be blunt. "What's my next mission?"

* * *

Ciel grit her teeth. "I've been struggling with this for days about whether I should send you on this mission. It's been on the missions list for some time now but…" she drifted off and sighed before selfishly telling Naruto what she wanted him to do. "Anyway, I want you to destroy the Disposal Center, where they retire our comrades one after another. Today is the day that they are scheduled to retire several of our comrades who were caught. They're were charged and convicted of being a Maverick without so much as a fair trial."

"Why didn't you tell me that earlier? I could have left sooner…"

"I…I didn't want to be too demanding," Ciel answered. "You're already helping us without any compensation. I wanted to give you all the time you had to prepare."

"To help me prepare? Or to assess my performance?" Naruto asked not unkindly.

She winced. The blond boy seemed to understand and read her in a way that no one else did.

"Both," Ciel admitted. She got the feeling that Naruto had already known the answer before he even asked the question. For such a brash boy, he could be surprisingly deep at the right moments. She half-wondered if the brashness was just as a mask that allowed him to hide his inner thoughts.

"I see," Naruto said gently. "No one has ever come back from this mission, huh…"

"No," she shook her head. "As I already mentioned to you, the Reploid Disposal Center has set schedules on when they retire Reploids. We've sent rescue forces many times, but they always failed. In the end, we just ended up losing more comrades."

"And so you're here," Naruto concluded. "You're wondering if you're going to be adding my name to the gravestone next." Ciel didn't respond and just continued to shed tears silently. "Hey…" he said gently, "don't go killing me off just yet. I'm stronger than anyone you met so far, right?"

"There's a B-rank Reploid in there, Naruto! One of the elites! Yes, if you had absolutely no chance of survival, I wouldn't be asking you this but…but…" she trailed off.

The older boy sighed from his spot next to her as he continued to look up. "Ciel, I appreciate the thoughts, but I already promised that I would help you on my own accord. Don't feel guilty or burdened because of a choice that I made."

Ciel's breath hitched at those words. They were pretty much the same as Passy's last words to her. She only felt that those words wouldn't be lead to the same outcome for Naruto as they did for Passy.

But at the same time, she felt a surge of gratitude in her heart and nodded. "Thank you," she murmured softly. "I'll try my best to believe in you, then. Even if the retirement date is set for this morning, there is plenty of time left for us to prevent any loss of Reploid life. Please destroy the enemy facility, Naruto."

"You can count on me," Naruto replied in a somber tone, a direct contrast to how he normally reacted. He hopped off the rock and took her by the hand to help her down. Let's first go back to the base."

* * *

A few hours later, Naruto found himself packed and ready to go. As Naruto left the underground Resistance Base, Naruto heard Ciel giving him instructions over the wireless communicator she had attached to his portable Trans Server.

"Naruto, we can see you on our cameras right now. If you continue to directly east at top speed, you'll see a guarded restricted zone in about two hours! The Reploid Disposal Center is at the center of the restricted zone. Good…good luck, Naruto!"

Before the mission began, Naruto left her with one final comment. "I promise the Reploid Center will be destroyed, Ciel. I won't die. You better believe it."

Two hours later, Naruto found himself somewhat worried that he would run out of energy fighting hundreds, perhaps thousands of enemies. He knew he had a lot of chakra, but he couldn't fight an all-out war by himself indefinitely. For some reason, his stamina wasn't what it used to be and Naruto had to account for an enemy of unknown strength at the end of all of this.

To compensate, he entered the restricted zone and approached the Disposal Center in as stealthy of a manner as he could. In this case, Naruto used a transformation technique to disguise himself as a Pantheon.

Less than a minute later, Naruto had to jump behind a vehicle to avoid a buster shot from several Pantheons.

"Damn it!" Naruto cursed as he body flickered repeatedly to dodged the numerous bullets.

Naruto punched through the metal armor of a blue Pantheon. Without pulling his arm out, Naruto lifted his arm to use the now-dead Pantheon as a shield against several buster shots. Feeling the Reploid's body heat up, Naruto threw the Reploid at a group of charging Pantheons just as it blew up from the accumulated energy from the buster shots.

Naruto body flickered behind another Pantheon, twisted its body to make it face towards the other Pantheons, and disappeared just as quickly as the Pantheon fired at several other Reploids.

Naruto mentally cursed as he continued wrecking havoc on the Neo Arcadian forces. Unfortunately, his infiltration plan hadn't worked so well. It seemed like the Pantheons, the degenerate blue clones of X, _did _have some sort of intelligence. They were easily able to differentiate between a transformed Naruto and one of their own and now Naruto was spending valuable time fending off waves of enemies.

Naruto decided to try hiding but it appeared that once the Reploids had gotten a lock on him, there was no fooling them apparently. Genjutsu didn't seem to affect them for too long and Naruto didn't even have time to take out a scroll and brush to use fuinjutsu because of the vast numbers the enemies had. He was too busy just trying to avoid all the buster shots.

"Damn it! There's just no end to these things," Naruto complained as sliced through another enemy with his energy kunai.

Naruto hurled an energy shuriken at several Reploids in the shape of a spiky ball and then jumped up as high as he could to put some distance between himself and the enemies.

Grabbing onto a chain hanging down from a large crane with his legs, Naruto flew through hand seals while hanging upside down. "Screw stealth and conserving energy. These Pantheon Hunters are annoying the crap out of me. **Katon: Hisei Endan (Fireball of the Fire Spirit)!**"

Naruto blew out a huge white-hot fireball that engulfed the dozens of Neo Arcadian Reploids below him and reduced them to nothing but ash. Even the concrete on ground itself was charred black.

Naruto smirked victoriously but groaned a second later when he heard the alarms in the area go off.

Dodging several buster shots from a dozen Pantheon Flyers, Naruto cursed and started running as fast as he could without enhancing his body with chakra.

"Damn it! I hate my life!" Naruto cried.

* * *

"Ciel?" Ciel turned around from the monitor to see her close friend and fellow scientist.

"Cerveau-san?"

"You can't keep standing in front of a blank monitor like that, Ciel," he admonished her. "You'll just worry yourself to death."

"He's human, Cerveau-san," she replied, "I know that he has incredibly powers, but he's on a mission that no one has even come close to finishing. He'll be facing hundreds of enemies and at least a B-rank combat Reploid at the facility. It's different from defeating a single Golem or even the C-rank enemy that had been guarding the factory."

"Noted," Cerveau admitted. "But there's nothing you can do at this point. And Naruto probably feels that way, too. He is either maintaining radio silence or has turned off the radio, probably to prevent you from worrying. You need to get a hold of yourself."

Ciel looked down in front of her. She had been tightly clasping her hands in front of her and her body had been shaking the entire time.

"Ah…" Ciel sighed as she forced herself to relax. "My apologies…"

Her mechanic friend shook his head. "There's no need to apologize. We're all worried. But we can't let it eat away at us. Look, you already set the system to alert you if Naruto sends a message. And you have to remember that you're human, too. You can't stress your body too much and do all-nighters like you've been doing for weeks."

Cerveau had a good point, but Ciel couldn't simply ignore her duties. She couldn't afford luxuries during a time of war. Moreover, this was a war that _she _herself had started by creating Copy X to replace the original X who had gone missing. It was her responsibility to see this crisis through no matter how much she suffered.

"I…" Ciel began.

"No arguments," Cerveau firmly stated. "Here," he grabbed her arm. "I'm going to take you down to see some of the others. It's been a while since you've spent quality time with the children."

"W…wait!"

Cerveau didn't relent and dragged her by the wrist downstairs to the main hall used for major announcements. She was surprised at Cerveau's behavior. Normally, like her, he was very passive. There was something going on here.

Ciel didn't have much time to think because she was tackled by a young Reploid girl holding a white doll.

"Ciel-neechan!"

Ciel wrapped her arms around the young girl.

"Alouette-chan! Everyone!" Ciel looked around to see all the Reploids in the Resistance—at least those who weren't out on missions or had assignments around the base—in the room. "What's going on?"

"Happy birthday!"

"What?" Ciel gasped as people cheered for her and even brought out a mechanical, unfortunately not edible, cake with fifteen bright candles that lit up intermittently.

"Ciel-neechan! Thank you for giving me my doll. I never really got to thank you after you sent it to me!"

Ciel smiled at the young Reploid girl. Alouette was one of Reploids considered too energy intensive to keep around during the current energy shortage and was immediately labeled as a Maverick. The young Reploid girl suffered heavy mental trauma and Ciel had hoped a bit of kindness would help the young girl to open up. Fortunately, given the happiness that Alouette was exuding, Ciel's plan had worked.

"Of course, Alouette-chan. I'm glad you like your present. How are you doing with the others?"

"Menart-baka is still playing pranks on me, but I'm getting along well with Perroquiet-kun! He's really nice to me!"

Ciel laughed. It was an open secret to all the adults in the Resistance Base that the young Reploid boy and aspiring scientist had a huge crush on the girl. It was no wonder that he was extra nice to Alouette.

Ciel set the girl back down on the ground. "Well, you be a good girl now and run along."

"Okay!"

Ciel spent the next thirty or so minutes greeting everyone else in the Resistance. She smiled as she received the mostly strange and random presents, but some sweet and useful—the thick hooded pink winter sweater some of the Reploids who had been domestic Reploids in Neo Arcadia was particularly nice—from her Resistance comrades.

Cerveau had been right. She really hadn't spent time with her friends—her family—because of her work. She had been far too obsessed with missions lately and in the last few months before they found Naruto, too absorbed with finding Zero.

_Zero…_Ciel thought, mood suddenly reversing. She had thrown away the lives of her comrades for something that hadn't even been a real possibility. She should have known better than to rush into a place simply because of high-energy readings.

But at the same time, they had no other options and no time to spare. It was incredibly fortunate that they had at least found Naruto.

Her mood dipped even further as she was reminded that Naruto was currently on a dangerous mission while she was here celebrating her birthday.

"Happy birthday, Ciel," Cerveau finally said, walking up to her, after the initial celebrations were done.

Suddenly remembering her suspicions that she had on her way down to the main hall, Ciel took Cerveau to the side privately as everyone else eagerly chatted and laughed at the stories being told by the old Reploid Andrew. "What's going on?"

Cerveau chuckled as he handed Ciel a silver necklace with a long turquoise gemstone. "Naruto's present for you," Cerveau said, as her eyes grew wide in surprise. When did Naruto manage to find something like a gemstone? "That's a relic of Naruto's past, in case you were wondering," the Reploid engineer explained. "From what he told me, this crystal was destroyed and repaired at some point. I'm sure he's exaggerating, but he said it was worth several mountains during his time. Or maybe he meant that in an abstract sense because he said that someone he loved like a mother gave that to him."

She felt touched by the sentimental gift and made a note to thank Naruto if…no…_when _he came back. Ciel looked appraisingly at the beautiful crystal. "There's…there's some sort of energy coming from it…" she said in an awed tone. Tearing her eyes away from the blond ninja's present, she looked at Cerveau. "You still haven't explained what's going on, Cerveau…"

Ciel was tempted to sigh as Cerveau laughed sheepishly. It was clear that her Reploid friend had been trying to sidetrack her with Naruto's present. "Well, you see. It was Naruto's idea." He frowned. "Naruto felt that you were being overworked and that a fifteen-year-old girl was still a girl. For humans who are mortal, birthdays are a big milestone. Naruto seemed furious when he heard that we haven't celebrated any of your birthdays since we escaped Neo Arcadia."

"But we don't have the time and energy for things like this! If I were still a girl in Neo Arcadia, then yes, I might have the luxury for something like this. But we're fighting for survival here, Cerveau-san! And…and…even right now! Naruto is out there suffering for _my _sake for something _I _am to blame for! It's too much to ask for all of you to be happy for my sake when you may all be retired at a moment's notice!"

"Is it really too much to ask?" Cerveau replied bitterly. "It's true that we're living with fear, but it should be moments like these that make life worth living for, right?"

There was a long silence between the two of them.

"Naruto…" she said slowly, mind slowly putting the pieces together. "Naruto asked you to do this to distract me…" She paused. "He…he must have somehow looked at the missions list and saw this particular mission was set on my birthday. That must have been why he seemed to know how I was feeling this morning when I talked with him…"

"You talked to him this morning?" Cerveau asked curiously. "It must have been really early because Naruto came and talk to me at 0700 hours to plan this so you wouldn't worry—" Cerveau clapped his hands to his mouth.

"So Naruto _did_ plan this stunt to keep me occupied and not just because birthdays are important, didn't he?" Ciel asked, deciding to go on the offensive…more to cover up the fact that she practically had gone on a secret excursion with the ninja than to seriously accuse her friend. There were already ridiculous whispers and rumors going around in the Resistance Base and Ciel didn't want to add to those.

Cerveau steeled himself and crossed his arms. "Well, I'm not going to confirm or deny anything. But I will say that Naruto seems to be the type of person who thinks of everyone else before he thinks about himself."

"Yes…he definitely does seem like the type…" She looked down. "I…I hope he comes back."

"You and me both, Ciel."

* * *

It had taken some time and effort, but Naruto managed to shake his pursuers. Naruto had decided to bite the bullet and summon a few hundred shadow clones to create mayhem as he quickly slipped away. The sudden increase in the number of intruders must have thrown the sensors of the Pantheons off because they initially had seemed confused and unsure of which clone to follow.

And with that, Naruto was able to return to his original strategy of remaining stealthy and slipping by all the guards, this time, of course, not relying on a transformation.

"**Touton Jutsu (Transparent Escape Technique),**" Naruto whispered as he disappeared from sigh.

He jumped over several spiked pits and strategically killing scouts and finally reached the facility undetected and without any more issues.

"Hm…" Naruto pondered out loud as he looked at the bolted shutter doors. He dropped the Touton Jutsu as it prevented him from performing any other techniques while the jutsu was active. He was inevitably going to get into a big fight so stealth was pointless at this point. "This is definitely the place based on the coordinates," Naruto rechecked his device showing his location relative to where he was supposed to go, "but I expected the area to be better protected. It makes no sense for Neo Arcadia to guard the outer regions so much and not important sites like the Reploid Disposal Center." Naruto shrugged. It was either a trap or it was possible that the Reploid guarding this place was just _that _confident about his or her strength. At this point, however, it didn't matter. Raising his senses to be on guard for any ambushes, Naruto raised his now-glowing hand. "Here goes nothing! **Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)!**"

_Boom!_

The outer door broke down revealing a long passageway.

Not sensing any enemies around, Naruto continued running down the hall until he reached an inner room where the retirement of Reploids was no doubt being carried out.

The inner door opened as soon as he touched it.

"Welcome intruder," he heard as the door opened, "I have been awaiting your arrival for some time now. My name is Aztec Falcon. Harpuia, the Guardian of Wind, sent me to clean up the trash here."

Naruto stared at the bird-like Reploid in mild shock. "You've been expecting _me_?"

Naruto instantly went on guard. He was loud and obnoxious in his youth, but even then he was excellent at hiding when he wanted to be. It couldn't have been the Pantheons as they were still chasing his clones around. It couldn't have been those strange video cameras that Ciel mentioned. Initially, Naruto had been under a transformation, which should have fooled the cameras even if the Pantheons weren't. Then, later on, Naruto had been cloaked under the Touton Jutsu, which was a ninjutsu that warped light around him, after giving the initial wave of Pantheons the slip. That should have been more than enough to fool the video cameras. Even the Pantheons he had met during the second half of his trip had been unable to detect him when he finally activated the technique.

Yes, Naruto knew that the moment he had destroyed the doors, his cover was blown. But that didn't explain how this Aztec Falcon knew _he _was the one coming. The bird Reploid didn't even looked phased or shocked.

To think that someone managed to catch him without him noticing…

Sighing, Naruto put his hands into a familiar seal and dispelled all the clones running around the periphery of the restricted area. They wouldn't be needed anyway and Naruto could use the extra chakra.

Aztec Falcon cawed in derision. "Fool! I wasn't expecting _you_ specifically, but you Resistance trash always send someone to die whenever a retirement is taking place." The bird Reploid pressed a button on the wall. "You've come further than most, however. And I don't know how you managed to fool over five hundred Pantheon hunters who seem to think there are hundreds of intruders on our border's edges instead of a single one here, but you're just in time! I'll dispose of you along with the rest of the garbage below us!"

Naruto slowly felt the floor vibrating and moving down slowly. Naruto maintained his balance with practiced ease. Well…it was a relief that Aztec Falcon didn't have a way to spy on him, but that did nothing to solve the situation he was in.

Naruto quickly looked down while keeping an eye on the bird-like Reploid.

"Help! Help us! Somebody, help us!"

"I don't want to die!"

"Help!"

Naruto couldn't see the Reploids, but was sure that it had to be the members of the Resistance Force that Ciel was talking about along with few other newly accused Neo Arcadian Reploids.

Naruto readied himself and got down in a battle stance.

Instantly, Naruto jumped back and latched himself onto the walls as Aztec Falcon charged at him with great speed. "You have five minutes before your friends die, ha ha!"

"Five minutes?" Naruto repeated slowly, as if digesting the information. "That's more than enough time!"

"Die!"

Naruto hopped across the room as Aztec Falcon leapt upwards towards him. He turned in the air and tossed several energy shuriken towards the bird.

_Clang! Clang! Clang!_

Naruto saw the energy shuriken bouncing off the bird's sharp metal wing-like arms. "You fool! Toys like that aren't going to damage me at all!"

Naruto ignored the bird and continued to hurl more shuriken at the Reploid. _That's right…just keep being an arrogant ass. It'll only make things easier._

_Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!_

_Ping! _

"Arrg!" Aztec Falcon stumbled as one of the shuriken embedded itself deep in his back. "Impossible!"

Naruto only smirked in response. Naruto had thrown the last shuriken to deflect one of the earlier ones he had thrown and redirect its path, causing a series of ricocheting of several of the shuriken, and finally leading to the hit. Normally, Naruto would have used chakra strings to guide the shuriken, but the material that the energy shuriken were made of didn't mix with chakra very well.

Naruto narrowed his eyes and focused on the situation at hand. Judging from how Aztec Falcon had protected itself and how it was stumbling from the hit to its back, Naruto figured that the only invulnerable spots were the Reploid's arms.

Naruto ducked under several lightning charged blades that were hurled at him. _And a lightning type as well…perfect!_

Ciel had told him that Reploids were classified by letter ranks: from S to F. Naruto had noted that it was similar to how his village ranked its ninjas and missions. Most Reploids C-rank and above specialized in a single elemental nature. There were a few exceptions, of course, like Guard Orotic, but if the dense lightning armor now surrounding Aztec Falcon's body was any indication, that wasn't the case here.

Wind countered lightning and wind, even after all this time, was still Naruto's best and favorite element.

Hands flying through hand seals, Naruto cried out, "**Fuuton: Fuujin no Reppuu (Wind Release: Gale of the Wind God)!**" He leapt forward along with the pressured burst of air and got inside the bird Reploid's guard as the Reploid tried to weather the onslaught of wind by using one of his arms as an anchor. Naruto thrusted his arms forward as the wind completely discharged the lightning surrounding the Reploid's body. "**Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)!**"

_Crash!_

Aztec Falcon slammed into the wall.

Naruto jumped back cautiously to observe if the Reploid was dead from a safe distance.

"Grrr…" Aztec Falcon groaned as he stood up. "Not bad, for Resistance garbage…I am going to enjoy tearing you apart…"

Naruto whistled in surprise. "You Reploids sure are tough," he remarked as he prepared another Rasengan. Guard Orotic had managed to weather dozens of Rasengans by continually replacing his damaged arms. Aztec Falcon seemed to be far more inherently robust and would need more than a single Rasengan to keep him down. "You're faster, stronger, and more durable than I expected."

"'You Reploids,' you say?" Aztec Falcon growled. "You speak as if you're not a Reploid yourself. Do you claim to be human?"

"Yup!" Naruto smiled as he dodged a lightning-charged swipe. "One of the most kick-ass, awesome, and handsome humans you'll meet, but yeah, human."

"Heresy!" Aztec Falcon screamed as he slammed his arms onto the ground, charging it with dangerous electrical energy. Naruto leapt back onto the wall and held himself there with his chakra. "Humans do not have such fighting abilities. It is our responsibility as Reploids to protect humans and you, as a Reploid, declare yourself as one? This is beyond even _Maverick _behavior. This is heresy! Die, heretic!"

Naruto didn't bother responding. The Reploid was going to die anyway, so what business did Naruto have breaking him out of his delusion?

"What to do…?" he muttered as he looked at the charged floor. Naruto did not have a desire to be electrocuted like a carrier pigeon caught in a thunderstorm.

Naruto was beginning to run out of time though and he needed a plan. These higher ranked Reploids were far more durable than he had anticipated and it didn't look like even another Rasengan was going to keep Aztec Falcon down. Some of his stronger techniques were out of the question because of the relatively enclosed space.

Naruto mentally groaned. He really should have learned deadly techniques that also didn't destroy the entire area around him after his encounter with the Golem. He had never got around to it in the last two weeks because he had been too focused on retrieving his memories and later, training those two bumbling idiots in the Resistance.

_Who did I piss off to always find myself in these situations?_ Naruto thought sarcastically.

That moment, Aztec Falcon jumped to his location and punched at his head. Naruto turned his head as the Reploid's sharp arm went into the wall. "Die you heretical Maverick! Die!"

Naruto merely swung himself over Aztec Falcon's metal arm, twisted himself in the air, and slammed a heel on the Neo Arcadian's face.

_Thud!_

"Ow, that hurts!" Naruto winced and nursed his foot as the Reploid slammed into the ground. Even with chakra amplification, his heel was screaming in pain. "What are you made of? Metal?" Naruto slapped himself for that stupid comment and jumped to the other side of the room as Aztec Falcon attacked him again. "Uh…never mind."

Was there anything this guy was particularly weak against? Naruto was able to neutralize his lightning attacks with well-aimed slashes of wind, but the Reploid's fortified metal body didn't seem to be particularly weak against wind ninjutsu at all. Naruto had initially thought to charge his weapons with wind chakra, but remembered that the weapons did not absorb chakra well. His energy shuriken and kunai seemed to be able to penetrate the armor at least when the Reploid wasn't using his lightning armor, but not enough to cause a fatal blow. And Naruto was running out of weapons anyhow.

The Reploid was completely immune to lightning. Wind simply did not have the penetrating power needed to go through the lightning armor Aztec Falcon had over his body _and_ through the Reploid's fortified metal armor to cut him down. Fire, especially Naruto's fire, was far too dangerous to use in an enclosed room; he didn't want to be roasted along with the Reploid. Earth was weak to lightning and if Naruto wasn't careful to keep water attacks completely pure, water would be weak against lightning as well.

Naruto sighed. He swore that one of the first things he was going to do after getting out of here was create a weapon he could use to pierce these Reploids' armor. That and come up with a more precise jutsu.

_Wait…_Naruto thought. He had to stop thinking in terms of chakra.

Yes, impure water normally conducted electricity, _but_—Naruto smirked—impure water also short-circuited machines running on electricity.

Normally, that probably wouldn't have worked, but Aztec Falcon was sporting several holes in his armor from the energy shuriken Naruto threw earlier and the Rasengan it took at point-blank range.

Naruto looked down towards Aztec Falcon who was beginning to stand up after getting knocked to the ground. Naruto wasn't going to give the Reploid a chance to attack again. "**Suiton: Suiryuu Shirizokeru (Water Release: Water Dragon Pulse)!**"

Naruto spat out enough to flood the half the room and watch as Aztec Falcon screamed from the electrical energy in his body going haywire.

"I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" the Reploid screamed as the water entered the cracks in his armor made by the shuriken Naruto had thrown and the Rasengan that Naruto had hit him with. Sparks of electricity flew all around the room as the machinery inside Aztec Falcon short-circuited.

Naruto took out a pre-prepared scroll. "**Suiryuu Shouin (Water Dragon Sealing Method)!**" The water instantly vanished into the scroll, leaving only the kanji for "water" on the scroll. Naruto quickly took out his last three shuriken and placed them in between his fingers. Wrapping his body with protective wind nature chakra and ignoring the pain from where his shuriken cut into his hand, Naruto jumped down to where Aztec Falcon was frozen and slammed his wind-coated fist through the Reploid's core.

_Boom!_

There was a small explosion in the room and Naruto felt the floor give way as the explosion destroyed it.

He landed with a light thud on the ground of the basement where the retirement was supposed to happen. "Ow, ow, ow," Naruto complained as he stood up and stretched. "Man…the explosion might have hurt me a lot more if I hadn't thought to wrap myself with wind chakra." He looked down at his badly injured palm. "Okay, that was stupid," Naruto commented of his plan to use the shuriken as a way to increase the piercing power of his punch. "Note to self: never try to imitate Chidori with energy shuriken in my fist, although perhaps an incredibly sharp and condensed wind-based version using my hand _might_ work."

He supposed he _could _have just used a sharp wind based attack to cut through the Reploid's armor instead of the shuriken, but Naruto hadn't known if the water had had enough time to completely sap the Reploid's armor of its electrical power.

Naruto took out a scroll and unsealed something to wrap his bleeding hand around with. "Damn it. How pathetic…the only wound I got was a self-inflicted one."

"Um, savior-san?" one of them asked.

"Eh?" Naruto glanced at the green-clothed Resistance members and the several Neo Arcadians he had just saved. "Savior-san? Oh, no. Don't call me that. My name's Naruto, Toad Sage of Myoubokuzan. Ciel sent me." Naruto froze.

_Wait. Myoubokuzan? That's right! I am the Toad Sage! My summons creatures were toads! _"Ero-sennin…" Naruto muttered quietly under his breath. _He…he was my master! Ugh…I'm still missing something here…something about nature…_

"Ciel-san sent you?"

"Yup!" Naruto plastered a huge smile on his face, while making a mental note to think about his newfound memories later.

"Thank heavens!"

"Ciel-san? Who is Ciel-san?" A now-former Neo Arcadian asked.

"She's the leader of the Resistance! She's the one who has been protecting falsely accused Reploids all this time!"

"Eh? The Resistance?! We were told that the Resistance was a horrible terrorist organization!"

"You fool! They're the group that just saved us! It's clear that Neo Arcadia is the organization that's lying!"

"Um…guys?" Naruto asked, feeling uncomfortable about cutting their discussion short. "Hate to cut you guys off, but we need to get back. Enemies might be showing up any second."

There weren't any alarms going off, but the explosion that had blown the building apart was sure to have alerted the authorities.

"Right!" All the Reploids present agreed before they all collectively fell flat on their faces from having unsteady knees.

"Um…are you people in good enough condition to walk back to the base?" Naruto asked with a raised eyebrow when he saw them twitching on the ground. Naturally, it was understandable given what was about to happen to them, but it wasn't good for the trip back home if they couldn't even walk properly.

"There is no need, Naruto-san," one of the Resistance members told him. "There is a Trans Server in the basement of this building. We can use that to go back."

"Okay," Naruto nodded. "Let's get you guys back home."

* * *

"We're back!" Naruto roared as loud as he could as he entered the main hall. "Everyone, welcome several of our old comrades and several new ones!"

There was a huge shocked silence, before the entire crowd erupted in cheers, chanting Naruto's name.

The thirty-two Reploids who had been saved were quickly swept up into the crowd as people rushed to grab them, almost as if to check if they were real.

Naruto stood back, watching respectfully, taking satisfaction in the fact that he did something good for others.

Still, that only reminded Naruto that in this world, even more than he was in his village, where he had been an outcast, was truly alone. He was a comrade to those in the Resistance in name only. Unlike them, he didn't have any sort of emotional attachment to this fight. So in a way, he was still an outsider here. He turned around to walk back to his room so as to not disturb the celebrations.

Naruto froze when he heard a voice shout his name.

"Naruto!" Ciel called out as she threw her arms around him. Naruto was taken aback by the gesture but wrapped his arms around the girl. "Thank you! Thank you so much. I never thought I'd see the day when the Reploid Disposal Center was finally destroyed. Innocent Reploids will be safe for a while…"

Naruto smiled, somewhat sadly. For a moment, he had deluded himself into thinking that someone was happy to see _him_, not because Naruto saved the Reploids, but because they valued Naruto unconditionally. But even someone like Ciel…while she considered him a comrade…it was more of a partnership than anything more meaningful.

Still, he wasn't one to ruin someone else's parade. "Of course, Ciel. I made a promise that I'd complete the mission, didn't I?"

He gently tried to set her down but the girl only tightened her arms around him more. She didn't appear to have heard his words. "No…I mean…yes you did…but I don't mean _that_. Naruto, thank you…" she kept whispering, this time much quieter than before. Naruto was surprised to feel tears falling on the back of his neck. "Naruto…I…I…was so worried…thank you so much for returning…to us…and…to me…"

Naruto's eyes widened at her words. Eyes slowly softening as the girl dug her head into his neck, Naruto held the girl close. "No problem, Ciel-chan. And happy birthday."

* * *

**Author's Note: I made some changes to chapter 2 based on some of the comments and PMs I received. Nothing too big, but still flaws that stemmed from my incorrect understanding of the Mega Man world about the difference between robots and Reploids.**

**In terms of Naruto's power level…Naruto's base power is somewhere in between a B-rank and A-rank Reploid, although probably closer to A-rank. That would put him almost at the level of the Four Guardians of X. Naruto's strong, but he's essentially fighting against super-powered machines. **

**As you probably figured out, he currently doesn't have Sage Mode or any particular means to power up. Moreover, Naruto no longer is the jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi so he can't simply spam thousands of shadow clones anymore. Sorry, but I didn't want to make Naruto so overpowered this early in the story.**

**As always, reviews will be appreciated. Thanks!**

* * *

_**Naruto's Jutsu List**_

**Technique:** Touton Jutsu (Transparent Escape Technique)  
**Rank:** B-rank  
**Class:** Supplementary  
**Range:** N/A  
**Description:** The user uses chakra to bend light around the user's body, making the user completely invisible to everything. The user's presence is still there, however, so the user can be heard, felt, or smelt.

**Technique:** Suiton: Suiryuu Shirizokeru (Water Release: Water Dragon Pulse)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Mid Range  
**Description:** The user may use a nearby water source or create the water using a significant amount of chakra to unleash a small flood. The water is highly pressurized and acts to repel and drown enemies in a whirl of raging water.

**Technique:** Suiryuu Shouin (Water Dragon Sealing Method)  
**Rank:** B-rank  
**Class:** Supportive  
**Range:** Close to Mid Range  
**Description:** The user seals a certain amount of water into a pre-prepared scroll.


	4. Destroy the Train 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

* * *

**_Dreams about the Past_**

_"It is time, Naruto…"_

_Naruto nodded with watery eyes. The war had been finished and now that Naruto actually had a way to release Kurama without dying and without Kurama going on a Sharingan-induced rampage, it was time to let Kurama go free._

_"Of course. Per our agreement, I'll let you go free. Just make sure not to get into any trouble."_

_"Trouble?" the towering fox snorted. "We bijuu do not cause any trouble. It is you humans who cause pain in this world with your evil desires. I wouldn't be surprised if you humans started another war in the next decade."_

_Again, Naruto nodded, acknowledging the fox's words. But he couldn't resist throwing in one last shot. "I know. I meant it more about you getting lonely. Don't do something stupid and try to detach your spirit from the Gedo Mazo."_

_The method they were going to use was to tie the Kyuubi's and the other bijuu's spirits to the Gedo Mazo while allowing them to exert the will in the world around them. This way, the bijuu couldn't be controlled, manipulated, or sealed into items or people for human use and abuse. The bijuu, while tethered to the Gedo Mazo—something only Naruto could now control—would be able to travel the world as they see fit in a form invisible to all humans, guiding the world to become a better place._

_Kurama roared, although mostly in mock anger. "The great Kyuubi no Yokou does not get lonely! You think too much of yourself if you think I will miss you!"_

_Naruto laughed. "Yeah. Yeah. I get it, you stupid fox. Now go!"_

_Naruto watched as his body was slowly covered in red chakra. And soon, the chakra itself began to lift itself off his body and go into the statue._

_The elders of Konoha had asked him not to do this, but Naruto never broke his promises and always tried to do what was right. What Naruto was now doing was merely reversing the injustice that had been done to the bijuu. _

_Yes, Naruto would no longer have the unworldly stamina he once had, but everyone who knew him said he was too energetic anyway. _

_With the death of Sasuke, there were no more Sharingan eyes that could evolve to the Rinnegan and manipulate the Gedo Mazo. Moreover, Naruto was the remaining only descendant of Akuma, the second son of the Sage of Six Paths, and the only person whose cells could allow the Sharingan, and possibly the Byakugan, to evolve to something greater and Naruto wasn't letting anyone get near his blood._

_So, there was no more need for such fantastical power in this world._

_And besides, his Uzumaki bloodline provided more than enough chakra for him to use. As for power, Naruto could defeat anyone out there with a combination Sage Mode and the elemental ninjutsu he had learned after the war. _

_And that wasn't counting the vast amounts of chakra Naruto's body had absorbed from the Kyuubi throughout his entire life. _

_As the last of the red chakra floated away, Naruto heard Kurama's voice echoing in his mind. Naruto saw the transparent outline of Kurama holding out his fist. "Brat…the sixteen…seventeen years I've been with you haven't been as bad as they could have been."_

_Naruto smiled and bumped his fist against the Kyuubi's transparent form. That was as best of a sentimental statement as he was going to get from the fox. Kurama wasn't one to admit his feelings out loud._

* * *

"Unfortunately, Naruto, I don't have anything that can help you with that. We have the capacity to make repairs to Reploids, but we don't have the supplies or the skill to heal human injuries."

Naruto nodded, having figured as much. "I wasn't expecting you to. Considering that Ciel-chan is the only human in the Resistance, and a non-combatant at that, it wouldn't make sense for you to take the effort in learning how to heal humans." Naruto flexed his wrapped hand. "I didn't even ask you about it anyway."

"I can still check to see if there is an infection or not, however." Cerveau made a motion to look at Naruto's hand before Naruto waved the Reploid scientist off.

"There's no need for you to worry about it."

"Ciel would have my head if she thought that I wasn't taking good care of you," Cerveau remarked with mild humor. "She has put all her hopes in you, you know. I don't really care about _you_, but I do care about Ciel's dreams."

Naruto laughed. He didn't mind the Reploid's joke at his expense. "I won't tell her anything to suggest that you're damaging her hopes and dreams, Cerveau-san. But seriously, it'll heal in a few hours on its own."

"In a few hours?" Cerveau asked in confusion. "Even advanced Reploids don't have auto-repair functions that work that quickly. I was under the impression that humans took weeks to heal completely from even minor injuries."

Naruto nodded again. "For normal humans, you'd be right. But for as long as I could remember, I only needed a day or two to heal from even major injuries. Minor injuries would heal in hours or even minutes at times." Naruto frowned. "I know there was an explanation for this…actually, I think there were several…but I don't exactly remember what those explanations actually were."

"Hm…if you were a Reploid, it would be fairly easy to extract and decode your memories," Cerveau said thoughtfully. "It sounds like you have the human equivalent of data and memory corruption."

Naruto blinked at the comparison. "Um…okay…?" He felt slightly uncomfortable at that thought of someone poking around inside his head. "In any case," Naruto said, changing the subject to…safer topics. "I'm here for another reason. I need some sort of weapon that will allow me to pierce the armor of combat Reploids."

"Weapons?" Cerveau said with a frown. "Didn't I make you those knives and shuriken out of solid energy? They were rather difficult to make, too. It's hard to get our hands on the supplies. Are they not effective?"

Naruto shook his head. "They are. In fact, in some cases, they're more effective at cutting than my wind chakra, but they don't have quite the penetrative force I'm looking for. Furthermore, most of my powerful techniques have widespread effect and may cause too much collateral damage." Naruto decided to explain further. "I need something that takes the best qualities of both: destructive yet precise."

"Ah yes, considering that you're now fighting heavily armored B-rank combat Reploids, I would imagine you would have trouble, even with the latest technology."

Naruto nodded grimly. "And it's only going to get worse from here. I'm sure you read the reports I swiped from the Reploid Disposal Center: Aztec Falcon was easily the weakest of the B-rank combat Reploids, at least in terms of health and durability. I'm going to need other ways to put Reploids down and out for good."

"Well, I can't say I have any special ideas, but conventional methods for defeating Reploids involve busters," Cerveau said in a thoughtful tone.

"Busters?" Naruto asked. "Those are devices that shoot out those energy bullets, right? The ones that everyone but me seems to use?"

"Yes, although…to be more specific, those energy bullets aren't really bullets. They are actually high-energy beams that increase the kinetic energy of whatever they hit, causing a miniature explosion in whatever they hit."

Naruto furrowed his brow in confusion. "But they don't work on stronger Reploids."

"Yes and no. Unfortunately, with someone like Aztec Falcon who was a B-ranked combat Reploid, one shot from a buster won't do much damage. That doesn't mean that such powerful combat Reploids are completely immune from buster fire, however. With enough hits, the increased energy leads to decrease stability in the Reploid's body and core."

"So basically, I just keep pelting my enemies with these things until they explode?" Naruto groaned. He wasn't really looking forward to battles of attrition that lasted hours. It was completely antithetical to what being a ninja was all about. Ninjas swooped in, ninjas killed, and ninjas escaped. Naruto, with his flashy attacks, wasn't the conventional shinobi by any means, but even he had his red lines when it came to battling. "That's totally not cool."

Cerveau laughed at his words. "It's certainly effective though. X, arguably the strongest Reploid in history, fights using buster-centered tactics."

Naruto shook his head and decided to explain. He wasn't questioning the effectiveness at all; just the style. "Effective, but excruciatingly slow. I'm a ninja and I was taught to end battles as quickly as I can. Battles between powerful ninjas did end up going for a long time at times, but that was mainly due to ninjas dodging attacks. If anyone suffered a direct hit, they almost always died."

Naruto conveniently left out the fact that ninjas were also supposed to fight in a stealthy manner, which Naruto certainly did _not _do.

The engineer hummed and hawed as he mulled over the options that were available. "I suppose Ciel and I could make a mega buster for you, similar to what X-reportedly has."

"Ciel can make weapons?" Naruto asked. Naruto had a hard time seeing Ciel make anything that could hurt others.

"Of course," Cerveau responded immediately. "After all, she was the one who made…oops, forget I just said that."

"Made what?" Naruto asked suspiciously.

Cerveau shook his head. "That's not for me to say. She may tell you herself some day." Naruto wasn't happy about that but nodded. He knew that everyone had his or her own secrets. "Anyway, a mega buster allows for amplified attacks and drastically increases the damage a Reploid would take. A charged shot could potentially even pierce through multiple enemies. The only problem, however, is energy requirement. Mega busters are generally charged by the user's core. You, being a human and not a Reploid, don't have a core."

"Hm…" Naruto mused. "Well, I do have chakra," Naruto held up his uninjured hand to form a Rasengan. "Is it possible to have a mega buster or any other use chakra as its power source?"

Cerveau looked appraisingly at the chakra sphere and started analyzing it with various devices. "Ciel told me that you manipulated this chakra of yours into electricity and that the electricity you produced activated a Trans Server. In that case, theoretically, this chakra of yours could be used as a power source for anything. A mega buster is incredibly complex and will take a lot of time to refit one to use this chakra of yours."

Technically, that would solve some of Naruto's problems, but Naruto wasn't sure if he liked the idea of using a buster. He was much more of a close- to mid-range ninjutsu-taijutsu combination fighter. Using something like a gun didn't appeal to him much.

"Hm…" Naruto mused. "Well, how about this?" Naruto held up one of the energy kunai given to him by Cerveau. "Can you make it so that these things can channel chakra instead? If I can combine wind chakra with the solid energy of these weapons, it might give me what I need. At the very least, it'll be an effective stopgap for a while."

The solid energy seemed to cut on par with wind chakra and wind-amplified metal weapons. If he could amplify the solid energy weapons with wind chakra, there probably wasn't anything he _couldn't _cut.

"I should be able to refit them as well, but it might even take longer than refitting a buster," Cerveau said with crossed arms. "It's hard to tell. There's just not all that much we know about this chakra of yours."

Naruto grumbled. "It's not just mine! I'm telling you. All living things had chakra in my time."

Cerveau shrugged. "Medical technology and robotics really started taking off around four hundred fifty years ago. If people and living organisms truly did have this chakra, then there would be records of it."

A tic mark appeared on Naruto's head. "Maybe your technology isn't all that impressive. I'm telling you that every living thing has it. Trees, animals, humans…" Naruto growled. "Look, even Ciel-chan has it! She doesn't have that much, but I can sense it coming from her. I'm sure other humans do, too."

"Naruto, I'm not saying that you're lying," Cerveau placated as he continued to analyze the readings he got from Naruto's Rasengan. "I'm suggesting that people lost the ability to use chakra over the years. Ciel is rather unique among humans. It's probably likely that the genetic modifications done to her 'reawakened' this chakra you speak of in her body. You've never seen any other humans or even any other _organic _life form since you awoke. For all we know, Ciel could be the first one in centuries to have chakra again."

Naruto paused. He wasn't going to tell Cerveau that he _had _actually seen organic life by using the Trans Server to teleport himself to Area Zero that morning.

Nevertheless, Naruto supposed that Cerveau's hypothesis _could _be possible. Chakra wasn't strictly necessary for life. Chakra was technically the combination of physical and spiritual energy in a person's body. Humans may simply have lost the ability to mix the two together in some sort of reverse bloodline limit fashion that made people weaker instead of stronger. But as long as humans had both physical energy and spiritual energy, they would be able to live.

It still wouldn't completely explain the hypothetical absence of chakra in trees and living animals, but nature chakra was incredibly hard to measure and quantify even in Naruto's time as well.

_Wait…nature chakra…_ Naruto thought. _For some reason, that seems very important. I'm missing something here…nature chakra…_

Cerveau's voice snapped him out of his thoughts. "In any case, I can't give you an accurate timeline of when all of this will get done. It may be finished in the next week or two or it might take a full year. And throughout the entire process, I'll need you to make regular visits so I can take samples of your chakra and run some more tests."

Naruto nodded. "Of course. I'll drop by in between the missions that Ciel-chan gives me. It probably won't be on a regular schedule, but we should be able to make it work," Naruto took out a scroll and unsealed a few items. "Also, Ciel told me to hand these over to you. She said this one here," Naruto held up a small metal object, "is a flame chip—I got it after killing Guard Orotic—and this one here is a thunder chip—I got it after killing Aztec Falcon."

Cerveau took them and looked at them carefully. "Incredible! These are rare finds! These chips will definitely help in the process of making your mega buster."

"Huh? How so?" Naruto asked.

"We can charge your amplified buster shot with elemental energy!" Cerveau said excitedly. "I'm sure you've noticed that certain combat Reploids are weak to certain elements."

"Oh yeah," Naruto slammed his fist into his palm. "I wanted to ask about that!"

"Huh?" Cerveau stopped studying the chips.

"In my time, we had five basic elemental chakra: fire, wind, lightning, earth, and water. The strengths and weaknesses are circular with one element having an advantage over the next and a weakness to the previous. Is that the same with Reploid attacks?"

"Not really. Well, I wouldn't know," Cerveau added. "I do know about Reploid _bodies_, however. Most Reploid cores are powered by something called nuclear energy. It's simply a matter of converting that energy into the elements. We've been able to harness the power of three of the elements when building Reploid bodies: fire, ice, and lighting."

"Ice?" Naruto asked in confusion. "That's a sub-element…"

"Like I said," Cerveau said mildly, "I don't know too much about the elements themselves or charged attacks. But I do know how we harnessed those elements. Lightning was obviously the easiest to manipulate and incorporate into the bodies of combat Reploids because most power supplies run on electricity. All that was needed was to speed up electrons using heat and have them move in one direct—"

Naruto rolled his eyes at the esoteric explanation that he just interrupted. "Get to the point, Cerveau. I don't have all day."

"I keep forgetting that I'm not talking to another scientist," Cerveau groaned while slapping himself on the forehead. "My apologies, Naruto. I tend to ramble when it comes to things like these. Anyway. The nature of the Reploids bodies and the way elemental power is generated inside Reploid bodies make it so that lightning-based Reploids are immune against fire and weak to cold, or ice-based attacks."

"But not water?"

"You'd have to crack open a Reploid and force water into his or her body for that to work."

Naruto nodded, having done just that to Aztec Falcon. "What about the other elements?"

"As you can imagine, ice-based Reploids have bodies that are weak to fire as fire damages the cold reactors placed in their bodies. Fire-based Reploids have bodies weak to lightning attacks as electrical energy interferes with the plasma—ionized gas, in case you were wondering—used to power fire Reploids."

At this point, Naruto pretty much had swirls in his eyes. "I don't think I understood half your explanation, even after you dumbed it down, but I think I got the important parts. Fire against ice. Ice against lightning. Lightning against fire. But only when it comes to Reploid armor or bodies since the elements themselves have different strengths and weaknesses. That sounds simple enough."

"I don't see how Ciel puts up with people who aren't scientists," Cerveau muttered under his breath. Naruto smirked, having heard the Reploid. It was too fun annoying the crap out of people who fancied themselves as intelligent. "In any case," Cerveau said in a louder voice, "I'm going to repeat it again for your benefit, but it's going to take me a while to create your new weapons."

"Take your time. I don't think I'll be running into a huge fight any time soon." Naruto took out another scroll and this time, piles of crystals fell out. "One more thing. Ciel tells me that these here are sorely needed energy crystals. She said you'd be happy to take these."

Happy was an understatement because Cerveau seemed to have lost the ability to speak for an entire minute as his jaw fell to the floor.

"Naruto! You brought enough energy crystals to last everyone in this base for an entire month. Research was going incredibly slowly because we had to ration out the energy crystals initially allocated for research to all the people in the base. You're a life saver!"

"Well, glad to help." Naruto smirked. "Cerveau-san. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful partnership. The weapons I use are expensive energy shuriken and kunai. I recovered all of them this time, but eventually I'll end up using and losing them, costing you a fortune. So here's my proposal. You continue to provide me with these energy weapons and I'll provide you with the goods." Naruto scooped a handful of energy crystals to make his point.

"Naruto," Cerveau shook his head in near mock exasperation, but smiled nonetheless, "you make it sound like we're in the human drug business."

The only response Naruto gave the Reploid scientist was loud, boisterous laughter.

* * *

A week later, Naruto sat in his room, meditating. Naruto had spent a better part of the week after his mission trying to meditate his way into remembering. Fortunately, while more details began to surface in his mind, Naruto still couldn't remember names, faces, places, or numbers too well.

It was a miracle that he still somehow knew all of his techniques and how to fight. _Although_, Naruto thought grimly, _I could just be thinking I know how to fight. I remember that I was stronger than any kage, so it's possible that much of my strength is still locked away. The power I have now is great, but it doesn't seem to be the power that I was sealed away for._

He did recall several things, however.

He was the Toad Sage. Myoubokuzan had been their home. And also…the Toad Clan was extinct. No matter how many times Naruto had tried to summon, not a single toad would show up. Naruto found himself subconsciously shed a tear for the loss of his dear friends, even if he couldn't remember many of their names and faces. But at the same time, Naruto realized that they had probably lived long and happy lives. For Naruto, it didn't feel long at all, but for the world, it had been a thousand years.

He also recalled that he had once been the vessel of the Kyuubi, the nine-tailed fox. Naruto remembered that he was mistreated by the villagers in his hometown, but eventually overcame that and even became friends with the Kyuubi and wielded the Kyuubi's great power. As with all his other friends, however, he couldn't remember the Kyuubi's name or figure out if he still had remnants of the Kyuubi's power. Naruto did, however, know that he was no longer the vessel of the Kyuubi and that the fox was sealed inside a statue called the Gedo Mazo.

"Yes…the Gedo Mazo…" Naruto rolled the words around in his mouth. "The Gedo Mazo, controlled by…something…I can't remember. But I _know_ that this piece of information is incredibly important…something to do with _eyes_."

Naruto held his hands over his eyes and pressed his palms on his head. "Ugh! This is just so frustrating. I don't have any answers!"

Grabbing his bag, he left his room to go do something more productive.

Go bother someone else.

* * *

"Naruto-san…" Dande whined. "We need a break…"

Naruto looked up from the book he was reading but disregarded the request. The idiots were the ones who asked for the training. If they were going to complain this much, they shouldn't have asked for it.

It wasn't Naruto's fault at all that he was in a bad mood and was taking it out on the two poor trainees.

"We're Reploids, but even we can't continue to train like this," Faucon said in an exhausted voice. Naruto noted that even the normally levelheaded and relatively quiet Reploid appeared irritated.

Naruto yawned, making sure to make it as loud as possible to annoy his two minions…err…students. "I thought the two of you wanted to become stronger. These things just don't happen; you've got to put in the necessary work."

"But all you're having us do is moving exercises!" Dande complained as he moved between several poles that Naruto had set up inside the training room. "Just what exactly about moving side to side and back and forth over and over again will make us strong?"

"We haven't done a single battle simulation since we started learning under you," Faucon added.

Naruto slapped his book shut and glared at the two young trainees. "I thought you were going to listen to my every command…if you don't like it, you can go back and fight under Colbor."

The two young Reploids fell silent at that for a moment but spoke up again.

"Ugh…" Dande muttered. "At least tell us this, Naruto-san…is this really going to make us powerful enough fight against combat Reploids?"

Naruto rolled his eyes. "Weren't you two the ones going around bragging to everyone that you're receiving some amazing training from me? I don't think I ever saw Colbor so angry before and that's saying a lot, considering how he hates my guts. And now you're saying that you don't trust me?"

Naruto mentally sighed, however, as he himself had asked similar questions of his teachers in the past when he was young. Naruto had assumed that the Reploids were more mature than the average genin. The two Reploids looked young, around their mid-teens, but they, especially Dande, were acting like preteens who had just graduated from the Academy.

Maybe a bit of explanation and demonstration would quell his students' doubts. It always had worked when he was younger. Naruto bit his lower lip lightly as he thought about what he could do.

"That's because we trusted you! We didn't want you to lose face!" Dande protested. "You should be rewarding your disciples for saying only good stuff about you. If Ciel-san knew that you were torturing us, she won't like you any—" Dande jumped back as Naruto flicked an energy shuriken at the trainee's feet.

Naruto almost let a growl out. Ever since the moment on Ciel's birthday where Naruto and Ciel embraced, everyone in the Resistance kept giving the two of them a hard time. Naruto couldn't walk down the hall with Ciel without hearing someone giggling or snickering. Naruto tossed one towards Faucon as well.

"Naruto-san! What was that for?!" Faucon asked angrily. "I didn't say anything! It was only Dande!"

"You dodged," Naruto drawled out in a lazy manner. "I wasn't intending to miss with that." That wasn't quite true, but he would exaggerate things a bit for their sake. Dande and Faucon fell silent again at the implications. "It's only been…what…maybe two weeks since you started training under me," Naruto said casually as he continued to read the computer science book. "But your bodies are already beginning to adjust."

"So you're saying that we're stronger already?" Dande said dubiously. "I don't feel any different though."

Naruto was tempted to throw his book at the helmeted Reploid. "What?" Naruto said in an annoyed tone. "Did you expect to feel like some kind of supercharged monster or something? You're going to feel the same no matter how strong you get."

Faucon, on the other hand, understood immediately. "All these exercises _were _battle simulations. You're just getting us to move in ways that we would move in battle."

"That's correct." Naruto nodded in approval and waved his book at them. It was a book on computer science that he was reading so he could help Ciel with her work. Cerveau had laughed when Naruto requested the book, but the Reploid engineer was soon undoubtedly going to have his lift his jaw off the ground once he found out that Naruto had learned years' worth of material in a few weeks via shadow clone learning express. "I suppose the technical way to say that is that your processors are getting used to integrating and executing data commands at high speeds."

"But what about these weights?" Dande argued gesturing at the weighted bracelets—marked with seals—that Naruto had placed on them. Fuinjutsu definitely had its benefits. Why no one bothered to learn the sealing arts back in the day, Naruto would never know. "We don't have muscles that grow and become stronger like humans do. What's the point of having weights that just slow us down?"

Naruto shifted around in his seat as he thought about what to say. He supposed it was a fair question. In fact, he had to check with Cerveau to make sure that there actually _was _a point to the two Reploids to wear weights.

"For humans, our bodies are what primarily adapts," Naruto explained, detailing what he had learned from Cerveau and his own reading on Reploid physiology. He had to stop himself from gagging at all the technical terms. Sounding smart just wasn't his style. There was nothing he could do to avoid that here, however. "However, for you Reploids, your _brain _is what primarily adapts. Because of what your bodies are made of, your bodies are naturally far more suited for combat human bodies. But like humans, your brain limits what your body can do. Through training, you can facilitate the release of more power similar to what happens when the first of the Eight Inner Gates is opened for humans."

"Eight Inner Gates?" Faucon repeated hesitantly.

Naruto groaned. He had momentarily forgotten that no one knew anything about chakra. "Never mind. It's something only chakra-aware humans can do." Naruto went on. "In any case, your specifications are based on three things: the design of your physical bodies, the power output of your core, and your brain's clock frequency and programming. There's nothing I can do for your bodies; they are what they are. Cerveau thinks we might be able to modify them later, but that's a long way into the future. And your bodies are the last thing we need to worry about anyway; your bodies are even more durable than mine and I was one of the strongest humans alive."

"Then?" Dande asked.

Naruto glared. "I was getting to that." Naruto put his hand on his chin in a thinking pose. "We most likely will be able to increase the power output of your cores with enough energy crystals, energy crystal that _I _will be wasting my time to hunt for…I might add. But where we can really do some work is with the final part, clock frequency and programming. Combat Reploids don't exactly have more powerful brains than civilian Reploids. The difference lies in with blocks they set in your brains to prevent you from expending too much energy."

"Like moving at high speeds or fighting," Faucon concluded. "You're pretty much saying that our brains aren't functioning to their fullest potential."

"Underclocked and programmed to execute only commands involving civilian functions," Dande added. "We can't fight because our brains have programs telling them that we aren't supposed to use that much energy."

"Yup," Naruto nodded. It was analogous to having the first Inner Gate closed. "Like you said Dande, your brains, however, dounderstand that you're supposed to be able to perform basic functions, like walking. So with added resistance, your brain will be forced into overdrive to compensate. Furthermore, with enough practice in doing movements that you'd be doing on the battlefield, you're pretty much writing in new programs into your brain that counteract the programs already put in place. It's not guaranteed, but I'm betting that the limits set in your brains eventually be forcibly removed, allowing you to do things that you couldn't do before. Your brains are like adaptable and upgradeable computers, which is amazing and a great stroke of luck for us in terms of training."

"Isn't there a maximum?" Dande asked.

Naruto nodded. "Of course. There always is. Even with humans, there's a maximum." Naruto pointed at himself. "For example, I'm at peak condition and there's nothing I can do to make my body more durable. I suppose I can get a little bit stronger and faster physically by strengthening my muscles, but I'm already very close to the limit of what human muscles and a human body can do. Similarly, there's only so much upgrading you can do to your brains. And ultimately, you'll be limited by the energy output of your cores."

"So just how do you exceed what humans normally can do? There are humans who train day and night and never get to where you are," Faucon pointed out.

"Because I use chakra to augment my physical abilities. I can use chakra to force my muscles to work harder. I can use chakra to shield by body when I'm moving to protect it against the pressure," Naruto explained. "What we can do with chakra is only limited by our imaginations."

"But we don't have chakra. Ugh," Dande groaned. "So it just movement exercises and buster firing practice."

Unfortunately, there wasn't anything more Naruto could do for the two of them. Their bodies were much stronger and durable than the average human's, even a ninja's body. However, their bodies were still relatively weak compared to combat Reploids and the two trainees had no intrinsic way of improving their defenses like Naruto did with chakra. Their best bet of fighting and surviving was to be as mobile as possible while using a buster to whittle down enemy life. They were even lucky that busters even worked against high-class Reploids. Otherwise, they'd be stuck with dodging indefinitely and that was an impossible game to win. Naruto supposed that they could eventually move on to using energy weapons, but without either speed or durability, it was suicide to fight close combat with high-powered combat Reploids.

"Unfortunately, yes," Naruto admitted. "Although even if you _did _have chakra, it would take you decades to get to where I am. Chakra manipulation isn't easy at all."

"Decades?" Faucon asked inquisitively. "But you're hardly decades old!"

"I have decades worth of training through my shadow clones." Naruto reopened his book again. "Anyway, I think I gave you two a good explanation of why you're doing the stuff that you're doing. So quit complaining." Naruto tapped his book. "I hate studying and you see me doing it right here. And I have over two hundred clones upstairs learning how to hack. If I can study, then you can jump around with two hundred pounds each. Geez, I thought Reploids were supposed to be stronger than humans. I've seen human kids play around with this kind of weight."

The two Reploids groaned and continued to do the exercises that Naruto had shown them.

"Must be nice to have something like love motivating you," Dande grumbled after a few minutes.

Naruto eye twitched as he hurled his book at the young Reploid. The book bounced off the Reploid's helmet with a loud clank. "Shut it. Next person who cracks a joke about my _friendship_ with Ciel-san is going to have his weights doubled."

Frankly, Naruto thought that the young leader of the Resistance was rather pretty, but he had too much on his plate right now with his memory loss and fighting against Neo Arcadia to even consider a relationship with _anyone_. Naruto was fairly certain the girl felt the same way as well.

The Reploids in the Resistance apparently thought it would be "cute" if the only two humans in the base somehow got together.

Naruto rolled his eyes. It seemed that machines somehow had the capacity to be just as immature as preteen humans. He mentally snorted. It seemed that people couldn't live without introducing some sort of drama in their lives.

"Naruto-san," Faucon said in a thoughtful tone as he shot down a moving target while jumping out from behind cover. "All this forceful denying is only going to come back and haunt you when you and Ciel-san finally announce your—"

_Crash!_

Naruto stood over the groaning Reploid with his hands in a hand seal. He noticed with no small bit of smugness that other Reploid suddenly decided that his training wasn't too hard, after all. Naruto turned back to look at Faucon, who was rolling on the ground. "I warned you. Next time, I'm kicking your ass. Now shut up and get to work, _minions_."

* * *

"So this is how you gathered food and supplies over the last few years," Naruto whispered to Ciel.

"In the past, there wasn't much we could buy aside from food. Much of the equipment we need is highly sophisticated military machinery and that isn't something we can just ask for in a local store. However, thanks to you, we now have a factory and we can make many of those for ourselves."

"I appreciate the thanks, but how are we going to get the raw materials?" Naruto asked. "It's not like you can carry it all and even if you could, you'll raise suspicion if you buy that much."

"We can just rent a transport truck for ourselves and drive it over to the factory."

"I never thought it'd be that straightforward," Naruto admitted. "You would think that Neo Arcadia would have greater security. Even now, we're just waltzing into enemy territory without any fear."

Their mode of travel was in part because cities in Neo Arcadia didn't have any known warp points that they could have teleported to using the Trans Server. Not that it mattered. While Trans Servers had been around for a long time, they were still considered military technology and barred from civilian use. Using a Trans Server to appear in any Neo Arcadian town was akin to painting a target on your back.

So they had left the base and traveled along empty road near a small town on a small vehicle. When they were still some ways away, they had gotten off to complete the rest of the trip on foot. They could have used the vehicle to get closer, but they still wanted to minimize the risk of alerting the government of their presence after the destruction of the Reploid Disposal Center. People in vehicles were subject to routine check-ups far more than travelers by foot.

Still, from where they stopped driving, it was a rather long walk and to pass the time, Ciel found herself explaining the geography of Neo Arcadia to the blond ninja.

"Strictly speaking, the Resistance Base is inside Neo Arcadia. Like any other inhabitable structure, our base inside the energy sphere known as the Eden Dome, which protects inhabitants from the harsh weather conditions outside and the Mavericks roaming in the surrounding areas."

"Mavericks?" Naruto asked in a surprised tone. "Real Mavericks?"

"Remnants of the Elf Wars," Ciel explained. "I'm not sure how many are out there, but they almost never will run out of energy because of all the countless energy crystals left in the ruins of the numerable cities on the planet. Part of the energy shortage has to do with the fact that most of the available energy on the planet is outside of the Eden Dome."

While Reploids weren't being added to the number of _true_ Mavericks, the number of Mavericks left over from the Elf Wars was still huge. Estimates ranged in the hundreds of millions. The number probably would have been in the billions had it not been for the harsh conditions—heat, cold, radiation, and storms—outside the Eden Dome. The ones left behind were all either specialized Reploids designed to withstand those conditions and modify themselves over time or Reploids smart enough to figure out how to avoid being exposed to the unforgiving weather outside.

"What?" Naruto suddenly stopped and grabbed her wrist. She felt him turn her around. "Ciel-chan, you're telling me that you've been running away from the Resistance Base into _Maverick-infested territory_? When we were in Area Zero, you didn't tell me there were Mavericks around."

Ciel winced. Maybe that hadn't been the best thing to tell the blond ninja. He was reckless, but only when it came to his own safety. He was surprisingly meticulous and careful about everyone else's wellbeing.

And if she hadn't gotten to know him so well, she might have shrunk back at his rebuke. But she knew it was Naruto's way of showing his concern.

"That's a bit hypocritical, Naruto," Ciel wryly replied, "especially when you're fighting powerful combat Reploids and then pretending that you didn't." She hadn't forgotten the incident in the factory where he took on a C-rank with no support and without permission.

"T…t…that's different," Naruto insisted.

"How so?"

Seeing the nervous look on Naruto's face made Ciel smile lightly. Things were…interesting…to say the least when she wasn't the one flustered.

Naruto pouted. "Well, first of all, I'm awesome. Secondly, I _know _I'm awesome." Ciel blinked at him in surprise. Naruto was lively most of the time, but he wasn't this blatantly arrogant even as a joke. "So I knew I could take anything that got in my way."

"Um…" Ciel didn't know what to say to counter that. She certainly wasn't going to make an asinine statement like Naruto just had. But at the same time, Naruto looked rather expectant for a response and she felt compelled to say _something_. "I…I had a buster," she finished lamely. "Most of the real Mavericks aren't particularly strong since they are old models. And Area Zero isn't really a hub of Maverick activity since Neo Arcadia regularly sends combat Reploids to clear out the area whenever the Maverick infestations becomes severe."

Naruto groaned. "Ciel-chan, you really need to have some swagger when you talk about dangerous things. You can't give a rational answer like that."

Ciel smiled again as she turned around and began walking again, happy that she more or less came out on top for a change. "It's either that or silence."

The boy followed and sighed. "Well, a silent walk would be unbearable so I'll have to manage. In any case though, thankfully, you haven't gotten hurt. All's well that ends well, I suppose. In the future, however, I'm going to tag along just to be safe." His tone turned gleeful. "It'll be like a date! I've never actually been on a date with anyone before so this is great!"

Ciel tripped on a stone and almost fell. "W…what?" she turned around to look at him with a bright face. "D…date?"

Ever since she hugged him about a week ago, Ciel felt even shyer around the boy. It didn't help that the whispers of them being an item were growing even louder in the Resistance Base. Ciel couldn't say that she felt absolute nothing towards Naruto, but there was little time for trivialities like relationships. Moreover, she wasn't even sure if her feelings were romantic in nature at all. For all she knew, she could be misattributing gratitude, attachment, or companionship for something more.

Naruto didn't answer her question, but pointed at a building coming up. "Look. We're here…I think. This must be the outskirts of town. From here, it should be a ten-minute walk to the first place."

Ciel nodded. They were beginning to see people around them as well. It was a convenient way for her to avoid the topic that Naruto had brought up and pretend that she hadn't heard what Naruto had just said.

"We should hurry, so we can make it back to the base by night."

She put her pink hood on to remain discreet.

Naruto looked at her curiously. "You know…you didn't answer my first question. I thought they'd put out wanted posters of you or something. It really seems strange that we can just waltz in like this and get whatever we want. Yes the Resistance Base is at the _edge _of Neo Arcadia, but this is an actual town. There should be more security here, right?"

"We're both humans, so there's a lot less suspicion surrounding us," Ciel explained patiently. She had to remind herself that Naruto barely knew anything about her world. "There's no reason for Neo Arcadia to waste resources on a manhunt for humans when they consider Reploids to be the main problem in the Resistance. As long as we don't enter a restricted area, we'll be fine. No one recognizes you and my identity is only known to the higher-ups of Neo Arcadia."

The boy frowned and put his hood up as well. "How can they tell you're human? From what you've told me, civilian Reploids might as well be human. There are barely any external differences. Shouldn't Reploids be able to come here and pretend that they're human?""

She furrowed her brow. "It's possible, I suppose," she admitted. "But it's incredibly dangerous. Many key government buildings have entrances that are lined with scanners that can detect energy readings from Reploids. Each Reploid has a digital serial number and if the serial number matches any of the numbers on the Maverick list, then the authorities will act. Humans obviously don't have that same issue."

It was why Ciel tried to limit any missions that involved Reploids entering towns. The benefits gained just were not worth the risks. They had a few spies, yes, but those spies were Resistance sympathizers among the Neo Arcadias rather than actual people blacklisted as Mavericks by Neo Arcadia.

"But won't they come after you if they catch your face on the security cameras?" Naruto asked. "Right now, we're under a genjutsu that makes us appear as different people to anyone who sees us, but before I got here, you never had a problem."

"Even if security cameras capture my image, I doubt the Neo Arcadian leaders would come after me in broad daylight in an area predominantly inhabited by humans. If people notice that a human is being arrested, there will be panic. Neo Arcadia takes great care even when arresting Reploids. They don't want to cause trouble."

"You know," Naruto said a bit dubiously, "there are obviously other things they can do once they recognize you…like follow you back to the Resistance Base…"

Ciel's breath hitched under her breath. It was moments like these when she realized that Naruto was far more experienced in warfare than even she was. She hadn't even thought of covert operations beyond the obvious hacking attempts Neo Arcadia made on the Resistance Base's networks. While she _did _keep her hood up at all times and took care never to be photographed, she hadn't thought of the possibility that Neo Arcadia was leaving her untouched so she could lead them back to the others.

Considering that the hacking attempts mainly revolved around finding their base, Ciel was fairly confident that their location hadn't been discovered just yet, but at the same time, that could be even more smokescreen to let them let their guards down. For now, she would have to hope that it was impossible for Neo Arcadia to constantly monitor the twenty-five million humans and many more Reploids living inside the Eden Dome.

"It's not really a problem now, though," Naruto continued in a cheerful tone, almost as if he read her thoughts. "I surrounded the entire base with seals."

"Seals? Like the ones protecting you and that statue when you were asleep?"

"Sort of," Naruto said in a sheepish tone. "I don't have the power I did when I made those particular protective seals. Those seals were slowly degrading for a thousand years and had lost much of their protective power." Naruto shrugged. "These seals aren't nearly as protective. A strong enough attack will still be able to pierce the barrier I set up, but no one will be able to enter and leave the base on foot without my knowledge and explicit permission."

It was brilliant. The Resistance soldiers almost always entered and left using the Trans Server; so it wouldn't affect them in the least. On the other hand, unless Neo Arcadia cracked the code for the Trans Server, they wouldn't be able to access the Resistance Base.

"Ah…thank you, Naruto," Ciel finally said after taking in everything he said. He was truly a godsend, walling up holes in their defense, providing badly needed firepower, and even making things livelier at the base.

"Of course," Naruto smiled. "I already promised I'd do my best to help you."

"Yes…but don't you ever have any doubts about helping us?" Ciel asked. "We're technically a criminal organization. And it's not like you've heard what Neo Arcadia has to say for themselves."

Naruto chuckled. "Are you deceiving me, Ciel-chan?"

She blushed as Naruto stared straight at her and shook her head. "No, of course not!"

Naruto nodded sagely. "Then that's good enough for me."

She would have face-palmed if she were anyone else. That was the most ridiculous argument ever. "You're pretty much accepting what I say at face value?"

This time Naruto laughed out loud. "I'm a ninja, Ciel-chan. I suppose I might have been naïve enough to trust the first person I met a long time ago, but I've been fought in wars. I've dealt with people who surrounded their lives with deception. And even then, I've always been a good judge of character even if I wasn't necessarily the best as seeing through deception. You're a good person and I trust you."

"…thank you for believing in me." Ciel shifted uncomfortably at that. Technically, she _was _breaking his trust by withholding information.

Naruto went on, almost as if he read her mind. "Of course, you might not be telling me everything, but I don't think that's a problem at all. We all have our own personal secrets. Oh and look," Naruto pointed ahead while waving his map, "we're here."

* * *

Naruto would have grumbled if it wouldn't have drawn attention to them. Ciel had been rather slow and methodical about what she selected and Naruto was getting bored. It would have been much simpler to just grab packs of instant ramen instead.

Now, with food packed away in the multiple storage scrolls that Naruto brought along, they were now in electronic shop to buy the raw materials and supplies necessary for Ciel's and Cerveau's research and operations that the Resistance carried out.

"You're surprisingly wealthy for someone who's supposed to be a fugitive," Naruto muttered softly.

He saw the edges of Ciel's lips tug at that. "Technical knowledge is just as important as combat ability in this world. Money is digitalized as well in this world and it isn't too difficult for me and Cerveau to cause funds to suddenly disappear from Neo Arcadia's accounts. We never take too much, however; otherwise, Neo Arcadia will have an extra incentive to come after us with more force."

Naruto almost snorted at that. "You're basically saying that you steal money from the government."

"From a moral standpoint, I would argue that misappropriating funds from a corrupt government is far more acceptable than killing for money."

Naruto crossed his arms. The girl had a fair point. "I suppose you're right, although I never really did kill simply for money. For the most part though, I was only sent on missions that involved killing _evil _people. It's a bonus that I got paid."

"For some reason, I have a feeling that it's supposed to be the other way around…your village killing for money and it being a bonus that the people your village killed were evil," Ciel shot back.

Naruto shrugged in a careless manner. "Same difference." He smirked when the girl looked mildly annoyed at his dismissal of her words.

After an hour of tailing Ciel, Naruto got bored and decided to head outside to see what human civilization was like a thousand years after the era of the ninjas. "I'm going to step outside to explore for a bit," Naruto whispered. "I can't make a shadow clone in here, but I'll do it as soon as I find a street corner and send a clone back to you."

Ciel looked rather upset at that, but nodded. She couldn't make a huge fuss here without raising suspicion.

Outside, Naruto looked around. Ciel had told him that Neo Arcadia was a giant city; Naruto figured it would be one gigantic mess of buildings. But the "city" of Neo Arcadia actually seemed to be more of a huge collection of small and spacious towns connected by nicely paved roads. There were even trees and bushes all around within the town, and even more in between the towns if the densely forested area just beyond the town was any indication.

"Hey," Naruto heard a voice, "DR-31. I need you to deliver this package to the Neo Arcadian Shrine. Be as careful and discreet as possible."

Naruto hid behind a tree to avoid detection from the two people speaking, one of which was already confirmed to be a Reploid. "**Touton Jutsu (Transparent Escape Technique)!**" he murmured softly as he faded from sight.

It was a precaution. Genjutsu only worked when Reploids weren't overly focused or aware. A transformation only worked if Reploids didn't have systems that requested digital fingerprints when other Reploids were sighted. These Reploids didn't seem to be combat Reploids that had sophisticated systems like the Pantheons did, but Naruto didn't want to take a chance.

This particular technique allowed Naruto to completely disappear from sight by letting light pass through him, making it harder for him to be detected, even by Reploid scanners. That was something he found out the hard way during his last major mission to destroy the Reploid Disposal Center. That being said, Naruto didn't want to test his luck and made sure to stay as quiet and discreet as possible even under the technique.

"What's this for?" The Reploid named DR-31 asked in a curious tone. "Usually, packages are sent to the lower government offices, not a central building like the Shrine."

_Neo Arcadia Shrine? _Naruto repeated in derision. _What's next? Temple? Geez, the rulers of Neo Arcadia must have a god-complex or something. Reminds me of… _Here, Naruto's mind went blank. Naruto knew it must have been one of the enemies he fought before, but he couldn't place his finger on the name. _Whatever, I'll worry about that later._

"I…I shouldn't really say," the first person said.

"Oh come on, CS-58" DR-31 whined. "We were created on the same day! We've been friends for years. I won't tell!"

"Heh. Heh," the first Reploid, now revealed as CS-58, replied sheepishly. "Well, you know how I'm a computer scientist Reploid, right? I was commissioned by the Neo Arcadian officials to design a special Cyber-Elf for X-sama. It took several years working with my colleagues, but it's finally done."

"A rare Cyber-Elf?!" DR-31 exclaimed. "I didn't know that you were working on such an important project for the government!"

_A Cyber-Elf? _Naruto frowned. What were Cyber-Elves?

"Be quiet, you numbskull!" CS-58 hissed. "Someone might hear!" There was a tense silence between the two.

"Look, I'm asking you for this favor because you're the only one in the subway industry. You regularly transport supplies all over Neo Arcadia, right? I know you've done top-secret government work as well."

"Okay! Okay! I got it," DR-31 hastily replied. "I'll have to get special permission to enter the restricted areas, but it should be fine. You're lucky that there's a train leaving soon though. Otherwise, it might have taken some more time."

"Good. I'll send word to the government that you'll be delivering it within the next hour. Now scram!"

* * *

Ciel was just finishing up gathering several of the supplies that Cerveau had requested. From what she understood, Naruto had requested that Cerveau make a specialized buster in order to fight in a more precise way. Personally, she considered energy melee weapons to be more precise, but seeing how many of Naruto's techniques seemed to spread over a dozen meters, she supposed that a charged buster shot would be relatively more "precise."

"Ciel-chan," the clone next to her whispered urgently.

She raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"Boss—"

"Boss?" she interrupted. "Who's that? Your original?"

The clone nodded quickly. "Look, this is really important. Boss found out that Neo Arcadia commissioned several Reploid scientists in the area to create a Cyber-Elf for them."

"Cyber-Elf?" Ciel almost dropped her supplies. "What are you talking a—"

"Ciel-chan, quit interrupting me!" the clone said in exasperation. "Anyway, the Cyber-Elf is being delivered to the Neo Arcadian government right now. They said the Cyber-Elf was for X's personal use, so it can't be for any good. Moreover, they said it was a rare Cyber-Elf that had taken years to design, so it must be quite powerful."

"It definitely _isn't _good," Ciel agreed with a worried look. "Cyber-Elves are powerful entities of living data that can act to power a Reploid up. Only a triple-level Cyber-Elf—ah it's one that has three stages of evolution," Ciel added seeing that the clone didn't understand, "takes years to create. And if X is using one, then it must mean that he's preparing for war. He must have heard that the Resistance destroyed the Reploid Disposal Center and is looking to finish us off."

The clone nodded grimly. "Boss doesn't know what Cyber-Elves are at the moment, but based on what he was able to hear, he figured it wasn't going to be good for the Resistance. He followed the Reploid delivering the Cyber-Elf and is looking to prevent Neo Arcadia from getting their hands on it."

"Wait! He can't go without any sort of plan whatsoever!" Ciel cried as she grabbed the clone and left the store they were in. "Where is he?" she demanded.

The clone looked taken aback by her forceful words and actions, but then suddenly adopted a remorseful look on his face. "Um…"

"What is it?" Ciel said fearfully, knowing fully well what the clone was going to say.

"The train already left."

* * *

**Author's Note: If you find it unbelievable that Ciel can just walk into a Neo Arcadian settlement without being arrested, the only explanation I can give is what Copy X said in Mega Man Zero 3:**

**_"Is that... y-your answer? Fine. You have a monopoly on energy resources... And Zero, a Reploid with terrifying f-fighting skills... Y-you are nothing more than filthy extremists! Ciel... I was holding-ng back until now, because you were there, a human... Now, you can face the consequences, along with your Maverick friends!"_**

**And remember, Copy X knows that Ciel is his creator. So it's entirely possible that Copy X _is _holding back. Well…so for this story…is Copy X "holding back"? Or is Neo Arcadia just that incompetent? It doesn't really matter and you can decide for yourselves. For the purposes of this story, either explanation is fine. **

**As always, reviews will be appreciated. Thanks!**


	5. Destroy the Train 2

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

* * *

**_Dreams about the Past_**

_"Naruto…"_

_"Don't talk, Sasuke!" Naruto cried out. "We'll figure out how to heal you! Sakura-chan is one of the greatest medics in the world. She can heal anything!"_

_Despite his words, Naruto knew it was hopeless when he saw Sakura weeping uncontrollably next to him as she continued to pump chakra into Sasuke's. _Sakura-chan, you really love him, don't you?_ Naruto noted sadly._

_"Idiot…" Sasuke coughed out. "You're such a horrible ninja. You can't even manage to tell a lie properly." Sasuke chuckled. "Look, I don't have much time...so…before I die…I want to leave my will behind…"_

_"Can it, Sasuke! Don't you give up! Don't you dare die! We'll be Team 7 again and everything will go back to how it should be! You don't have the right to take that hope away from us!"_

* * *

_Naruto stood in front of Sasuke's grave, the first time since Sasuke's death and funeral. Despite his crimes, the villagers had given him a hero's burial once they heard about his contributions in the war._

_Naruto shook his head. In the end, the villagers were looking for any excuse to forgive the last Uchiha._

_"You're such a bastard…" Naruto muttered. "You've had everything anyone could want in life and you consistently chose to toss it away for something as empty as revenge." Naruto sighed. "It's not like I can't understand. When Ero-sennin died, I was raving for revenge, too. But the thought eats away at your soul and consumes you…"_

_Naruto looked up to think about the aftermath of the war. There was finally widespread peace and understanding between the villages…at least for now…but the cost…_

_Over fifty percent of all active ninjas had been killed in the war and another twenty percent were permanently scarred in some manner. Of Team 7, Naruto had been the only one to survive. He wondered if this was how Kakashi had felt after Naruto's father had passed away…_

_Completely alone…_

_"Sakura-chan really loved you, you know," Naruto informed his dead friend. "She went crazy a week after your death and committed suicide."_

_Another casualty of the war…_

_"I think I'm old and mature enough," Naruto smiled briefly at the thought—no one would ever admit that he was truly mature, "to say that I loved her dearly. I'm not entirely sure why I did, but ever since I saw her in the Academy, how she struggled to fit in and worked hard to improve herself, I think I fell in love." Naruto sighed again. "Like I said, you had everything anyone could want…everything _I _wanted in life. Couldn't you have treasured it a bit more?"_

_Naruto turned around to walk away from the grave. He briefly considered visiting Sakura's grave as well, but shook his head. He had to move on. It had been three weeks since she died, but her death still weighed heavily on his heart. Until he was able to give up his feelings for her, he wasn't going to visit her grave._

_She was really never Naruto's and he had no more desire to delude himself with fantasies of what could have been. Not when the girl was dead for good._

_"I'll see you later, Sasuke."_

* * *

Naruto snuck into the subway that the delivery Reploid had disappeared into. He maintained as much distance as he could afford between him and the delivery Reploid in an attempt to remain undetected.

Naruto cursed when he saw the delivery Reploid hop onto a circular platform and disappear downward, no doubt to a lower level were the train was stationed.

Naruto paused as he tried to think of a plan. There was no way he could follow the same path that DR-31 just took; Naruto didn't have any sort of identification that would allow him to bypass the security system on the lift. He looked around. The only way down seemed to be through a metallic doorframe located in a wall at the end of the room. It most likely was a roundabout way to where DR-31 was headed towards, but Naruto didn't have any other options.

He quickly passed through the metallic doorframe to access the ladder just beyond the entrance.

_Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Unauthorized Personnel Detected! _

"Crap!" Naruto groaned. Clearly, the motion scanner—which was what the doorframe apparently was—wasn't fooled by the Touton Jutsu like the built-in scanners that the Pantheons had. "I hate technology! It renders so many of my stealth techniques useless."

There was nothing he could do to change that though. Everything in his past revolved around chakra usage. Barriers were designed to detect and repel chakra. Restraints involved sapping people of chakra.

In this world, however, it seemed everything involved around digital communication and actual physics. Pantheons had tools that allowed them to communicate digitally with other Pantheons. Restricted places had motion sensor detectors. Barriers involved actually physically preventing access.

Naruto broke out into a run and jumped down the ladder, knowing he was now on borrowed time. DR-31 was probably rushing for the train now while enemies tried to slow Naruto down. It also didn't help that DR-31 had a more direct route to the train. Naruto wouldn't be surprised if the Reploid had already arrived to where the train was by now.

Landing in a crouch, Naruto leapt forward and slashed a bat-like Reploid that had come down to bite him with an energy kunai. Naruto didn't even flinch as the two pieces of the bat Reploid blew up in a small burst of energy.

He jumped over a couple Reploids on wheel that had raced towards him in an effort to run him over and destroyed them with two well-aimed energy shuriken. He didn't even bother to pick the energy shuriken back up and raced forward. Time was of essence here, so he couldn't be worried about supplies no matter how expensive they were.

Naruto kicked off the next wheeled Reploid and slashed through another one with his energy kunai, not even flinching when red fluid spurted out.

A couple more body flickers took him into a thicket of Pantheons, which Naruto cleared using a couple of wind strikes.

"**Fuuton: Fuujin no Reppuu (Wind Release: Gale of the Wind God)!**"

_Choo! Choo!_

Naruto swore as he slashed through several green vehicle-like Reploids equipped with busters as turrets. DR-31 had already made it to the train.

"That must be the damn train starting up! I don't have time for this!" Naruto was stringing together body flickers one after another, something only a few people in time were able to do, but he still wasn't making enough progress. He put away his kunai and flashed his hands through seals. "**Fuuton: Fuujin Seigaifu (Wind Release: Holy Shroud of the Wind God)!**"

The air instantly whipped around Naruto and sliced the dozen bat-like Gli-Eyes that attacked him. He wasn't at all fazed as metal bits fell around him.

Naruto race forward at much faster speeds than even what his body flicker allowed, ignoring any of the Reploids that got close to him as they were instantly shredded by the violent winds wrapping around his body. This technique wasn't completely finished—he just started working on it after the battle with Aztec Falcon—and the jutsu literally burned chakra, but Naruto was out of options. He couldn't let that train go leave without him and this was the only way he could speed himself up. Naruto was significantly stronger than the B-rank Aztec Falcon, but he didn't want to take any chances with the legendary _S-ranked_ X. Anything that was going to make X stronger wasn't good. So getting that Cyber-Elf was crucial.

_Boom!_

Naruto paid no heed to the door he just burst through—Naruto briefly was reminded of a large dark man from Kumogakure whose name he couldn't quite remember who did the same thing regularly—and kept moving towards where he heard the train.

_Choo! Choo! Choo!_

Naruto's instinct screamed at him and he jumped back just in time to avoid a heavy spiked metal ball.

"Tch!" He had been so engrossed in catching up with the train that he hadn't even sensed the enemy's attack. The spike was made of extremely dense metal and wouldn't be completely sliced up be the sharp winds surrounding him. Nor would the winds be sufficient enough to repel the heavy metal ball. If he had taken a direct hit, Naruto might have been hurt regardless of his wind shroud.

Fortunately, there was a much simpler solution than whittling away at the spike itself. Naruto dodged the spike again and simply swiped his wind-coated hand to cut off the chain holding the spiked metal ball to the Reploid.

Sometimes it was just best to avoid facing problems head-on and cut away at it from another direction.

He rushed forward, slipping between the buster bullets that the enemy fired. The buster shots were fast, but Naruto was even faster in this form.

"Die!" Naruto slammed his fist into Reploid's chest.

His eyes widened when the Reploid only slammed backward, hit the ground, and slowly started lifting itself back up. Naruto had managed the pierce the Reploid's armor, but it seemed like the Reploid was still alive and functioning. Naruto jumped in the air, twisted his body around, and slammed his foot onto the Reploid's head. The Reploid's "head" went flying, but once again, the Reploid's body only fell backwards and began lifting itself again.

The Reploid still was alive and functional, even without its head.

_Damn it! I hate these Reploids. I always have to search for a damn weak point._

His eyes zoomed in on the orange core at the bottom of the Reploid as the Reploid started firing dozens buster shots in all directions. _That must be the core. Strange design, but I suppose it bought the Reploid a few extra seconds. _

Naruto leapt up and ignored the buster shots that were being partially deflected by his wind shroud. He wasted enough time as it is and with his wind armor, he wouldn't die if he got hit once or twice.

His fist punched through the core, leading to a small explosion.

_Boom!_

_Choo! Choo! Choo! Choo!_

Without even bothering to look at the remnants of the dead Reploid, Naruto barreled through the door on the other side of the room and managed to jump on the red train just as it left.

Letting out a relieved sigh, Naruto deactivated his wind technique and made the sign for a shadow clone to summon and dispel one to alert the one guarding Ciel. "Ciel-chan's not going to be happy when she find out that I'm gone."

* * *

Ciel looked at the clone half in worry and half in frustration. Her blond ninja friend from the past somehow seemed to find trouble even on what was essentially supposed to be a nice day-trip. "Naruto, transport trains are almost always guarded by dozens of Reploids. And usually the engine core itself is merged with a heavily modified Pantheon or protected by an elite combat Reploid. You won't be able to reach the train operator unless you destroy the engine core itself. That won't be an easy task. You need to dispel and alert him!"

Naruto had told her how his clones work and she knew that the knowledge that any particular clone gained was spread amongst the original and remaining clones (if applicable) once the particular clone was dispelled.

The clone frowned. "I can't do that. My job is to protect you."

"Then make another clone and have it dispel!" she urged.

"The clone shook his head. "I can't do that either. The Kage Bunshin no Jutsu divides the user's chakra even among the clones. Normally, that's not an issue because Boss has so much chakra. But the technique Boss used to reach the train in time ate up most of his chakra. Moreover, he already fought what he believes is a D- or C-rank Reploid guarding the gate where the train had been. In the past, Boss had a…well…umm…a secondary source of chakra to reach into during emergencies but he doesn't have it anymore. He has to be much more conscious of how he spends energy now. So creating an extra clone, even if it will be quickly dispelled, will only waste valuable energy. Right now, it's already bad enough that Boss is splitting his small pool of chakra between him and me. If what you're saying about transport trains are true, then every drop of chakra could be important."

She looked at him with grave concern. "How much chakra does Naruto have right now?"

The clone grimaced. "He spent about five minutes with that experimental jutsu activated. That thing guzzles chakra. Along with a few of the other techniques he used, he probably has about twenty to thirty percent left. He's splitting that twenty to thirty percent with me right now…so…"

Ciel didn't even need to do mental calculations in her head to know that Naruto was working with dangerously low levels of chakra. Normally, having ten to fifteen percent of total energy wasn't dangerous, but _entering _a battle with such low levels were potentially fatal.

"Ten to fifteen percent!? That's crazy! Why was Naruto being so reckless?! Using up more than three-fourths of your body's energy is extremely risky! And _before _a battle?!" Ciel gripped the clone's wrist. The clone looked rather surprised that she was being forceful, but Ciel didn't care. Her heart was gripped with worry. "And functionally, he only has half that because of you? You need to dispel! Now!"

Ciel was half-tempted to slug the clone in the face to force him to dispel. The only reason she didn't was because she knew that the clone was still stronger than her and would barely feel the hit.

The clone shook his head and swept her into his arms. Ciel didn't even argue as the clone started leaping towards where their ride was waiting for them.

At this point, there was no use trying to convince Naruto's clone otherwise. It was just as stubborn as the original Naruto.

"Not until I get you to safety. Boss recovers pretty quickly so he should be slowly gaining chakra as he makes it to the first car of the train. And by then…by the time he fights the engine core or powerful Reploid guarding the train, he'll have what's left in my reserves since I'll have dispelled by then. Don't struggle and I won't have to expel more chakra than I need to; I just need to get you back to the car."

Ciel could see the logic in that. So, Naruto hadn't just gone and done something suicidal like she feared. "But why is he so low on energy? Surely he could have been more judicious about how he used his energy!"

"No, there was no other choice. The technique Boss used increased his speed threefold and lets him disregard almost any attack. Even with it on, he only _barely _made it," the clone sighed. "Look, you're just going to have to trust him. Even with the little chakra he currently, he has more than enough to fight with. Even with only ten percent, he could take down elite ninjas in the past. It's true that he can't be as wasteful with his chakra and toss out huge techniques like it's candy, but it should be more than enough to take out even someone like Aztec Falcon. So as long as there's no one higher than a B-rank guarding that train, Boss should be fine."

Ciel nodded. She wasn't happy, but there was nothing she could do at this point except wait for him back at the base. At the very least, Naruto had the foresight to keep a portable Trans Server with him all the time.

Over the years fighting a nearly hopeless war, Ciel had become an expert at looking for and finding the silver lining in every bad situation.

* * *

"Crap!" Naruto jumped off the top of the train to avoid the charging armored Pantheon Warrior. Quickly channeling chakra into his hands, he latched onto the side of the train before kicking off to jump back on top of the train. "Take this, you bastard."

Naruto slammed a fist into the Pantheon Warrior's head, one of the few areas where it wasn't armored. Taking his buster, he fired several shots into the Reploid's back and jumped away as it died in a small burst of energy.

Naruto looked distastefully at his buster as he shot down the next armored Pantheon Warrior with impeccable aim. The Reploid hadn't had the time to raise its armored arms to protect its vulnerable head and fell off the train from the blows.

It was the first time Naruto used his buster in battle and he really didn't like the weapon all that much. For one thing, ranged battle wasn't Naruto's cup of tea to begin with. He preferred punching and kicking with his fists and feet with the occasional kunai to slash through anything his fists couldn't destroy. If he needed ranged attacks, Naruto would use shuriken or mid-ranged ninjutsu. Something like a buster required far too little movement to cause damage for his liking.

More importantly, however, Naruto didn't like the fact that shots from busters were too linear. That made it far too easy for opponents to dodge or block and too hard for Naruto to manipulate. Shuriken curved in the air and could be knocked in or out of course, making them more unpredictable in battle, even if they were slower than buster shots.

Naruto slammed a chakra-enhanced fist into another Pantheon Warrior's head.

He wasn't particularly a fan of using his bastardized version of…of…_someone's_ chakra-enhanced strikes either, but he had no choice here. Reploid bodies were already far more durable than human bodies and these Reploids were even more armored than the usual.

_I'm guessing that since Neo Arcadia can't necessarily overwhelm enemies with numbers on a train, they opted to increase the fighting ability and defensive power of each Reploid. But normally, it seems like they favor quantity over quality._

Naruto had to make do with what he had in this situation. He was down to a little more than a tenth of his chakra and wanted to conserve whatever energy he had left in case a strong enemy was on the train. That ruled out most of his ninjutsu. Buster shots and chakra-enhanced blows were going to be his choice of weapons for now.

Naruto slipped forward into the space between a Reploid and the spiked weapon it just slammed onto the roof of the train.

"You know," Naruto muttered as he fired a dozen shots into the Reploid's head, "I think you Reploids actually caused more damage to the train than I did."

The Reploid didn't answer and merely died in a small explosion as Naruto leapt away.

He dodged a missile from a flying Reploid that didn't have a distinguishable face or body. Naruto threw himself on the ground as the Reploid charged straight at him and flew over his body. Naruto didn't even look as he threw an energy shuriken behind him to destroy the flying Reploid before it could turn around and attack him again.

After a few more minutes of destroying enemies with his buster or knocking them off the train with a chakra-enhanced push, Naruto reached the first car. He noticed that it didn't have any windows that he could burst through. Most likely, that was by design so no one could break in. The only door present in the back of the car seemed to be a reflective surface mostly impervious to buster damage.

Sighing in resignation, he gather chakra into his palm and slammed his hand through the door to break it down. "**Rasengan (Spiraling Sphere)!**"

"Who are you?!"

Naruto looked at DR-31 carefully. DR-31 pretty much looked the same as all the Reploids in the Resistance except for his purple armor as opposed to green for the ones in the Resistance. In other words, DR-31 appeared to be more or less a civilian Reploid without any fighting abilities. The Reploid was standing at the opposite end of the room near a giant red ball, which probably housed the engine.

"Look," Naruto sighed, "I don't want to be here anymore than you want me to be here, so can you just give me the package you got from your friend and you can go along your merry way."

DR-31 looked at him fearfully and held the package tightly. "Y…you must b…be from that t…terrorist organization! The Resistance! I won't let you evil people have your way!"

Naruto snorted. _Stupid propaganda. _Neo Arcadia clearly had its citizens brainwashed if they thought the mostly harmless members of the Resistance were terrorists.

Well, whatever. It wasn't like he really expected soft diplomacy to work here.

Naruto cracked his fists.

"Well then, I'm going to have to _force_ my own way, aren't I?" Naruto growled menacingly.

* * *

Ciel managed to race back to the car in record time, courtesy of the Naruto clone express. She had essentially been carried in the clone Naruto's arms before the clone disappeared in a puff of smoke a few meters away from where the Resistance car was waiting. She had been so worried that she hadn't even blushed once during the whole trip back. It didn't feel intimate at all when she knew that Naruto was in danger.

"Ciel-san! What's going on?!"

"Oyie!" Ciel quickly breathed out as she opened the door to the car and jumped in as quickly as she could. If they could make it back to the base quickly, they might be able to send reinforcements. "Back to the base!"

"What about Naruto-san?" the confused female Reploid protested. "What's going on here?"

"I'll explain on the way," Ciel replied. She addressed the other Reploid in the car. "Colibri, do you have the portable Trans Server with you?"

The puzzled technician nodded. "I do, but…"

She interrupted him. It was rude, but this was an emergency. "Check the location of Trans Server 1010B!"

"Isn't that Naruto-san's portable Trans Server?" Oyie asked. "Why do we need to locate him?"

Ciel nodded. "Naruto's currently on an unsanctioned mission." She bit her lips when the two other Reploids looked at her in shock. Even to her ears, that sounded pretty bad. She decided to elaborate. "Naruto overheard a couple government contractors talking about a top-secret Neo Arcadian project about a Cyber-Elf. There was no time to think about anything and he went to sabotage their plans. Given the circumstances, I think he made the right judgment."

Oyie nodded and smiled lightly. "It sounds like him to take the initiative like that."

"What?" Ciel blinked. She could have sworn she saw the Reploid _blush_. But that couldn't be right…a Reploid having a crush on a human was ridiculous! And what confused Ciel even more was that she felt greatly annoyed by that little revelation.

Ciel snapped out of her thoughts when she heard a blip from the portable Trans Server that Colibri had taken out.

"I got a signal. He's currently moving northeast rapidly. He must be on a transport train or plane!"

Ciel nodded grimly. "I figured as much. I had hoped that he might have been able to stop the train so we can go provide him with backup, but with the train moving at such a rapid speed, the Trans Server won't be able to lock onto his constantly shifting coordinates long enough to transfer us to his location. The larger Trans Server at our base _might_ be able to lock on to his signal better, but I doubt it. Still, there might be a chance so we need to race back home as quickly as possible. Naruto is really low on energy and could use the help."

"Do you think we should contact him via radio?" Colibri asked worriedly. "We might be able to get a better understanding of what's going on. Moreover, we might be able to tell him to jump off the train and wait for us as we transfer ourselves there. We'd have to catch up of course, but we can transfer the car with us as well and use it to chase the train down. It won't be much, but having the four of us and a car would be better than him alone."

Ciel closed her eyes as Oyie kept driving back to the base as quickly as she could. On one hand, contacting Naruto might be a good idea so they could better instruct him on what to do. And having the four of them there together had some merit. On the other hand, talking with him might distract him from whatever fights he was in. Moreover, radio frequencies could be intercepted, leaving future missions at risk. There was always danger when they used wireless transmissions over large distances and when they were deeper within Neo Arcadian territory.

"Ciel-san, I think we should just trust in him and go back to the base for now," Oyie said. "I don't think it will help at all to contact him and try to get ourselves over there. And besides, he's the one who told you to go back to the base. Not to get reinforcements, but for your own safety, right?"

She looked at the Reploid in surprise. That was, in fact, what Naruto's clone had instructed her to do. But Ciel didn't remember telling Oyie or Colibri that fact at all. "How did you know?"

Oyie smiled. "Because that's what he told Team Colbor on _our _mission. He told us that he would cover for us and that he would be fine. He's the type of person who is always more worried about the people around him. I think it's a similar situation here. I know that transport trains generally have powerful Reploids guarding them, but Naruto already took out _three_ powerful Reploids in span of four or five weeks. He can easily beat one more. He'll be fine."

Ciel bit her lip in concern. It was true. Naruto had proven that he could defeat even B-ranked combat Reploids. And he claimed that he would be able to beat a B-rank in his current state. And transport trains were highly unlikely to have the stronger A-ranked Guardians of X guarding them. So technically, Naruto should be fine, especially after the clone dispelled, which doubled Naruto's reserves of chakra. And the clone itself said that Naruto would gradually gain chakra as he made his way to whatever was guarding the first car of the train even if he was fighting weaker Pantheons along the way.

Furthermore, it wasn't like the three of them could do all that much to help Naruto anyway, even if they were with him. If anything, they would probably just slow him down.

"Alright, we'll go back to the base," Ciel finally said after a few long and tense seconds. "If our larger Trans Server can pinpoint and lock onto his coordinate, we'll think about sending reinforcements then. For now, we'll just trust in him."

* * *

After a few seconds of scaring the train operator, Naruto body flickered forward quickly to snatch the package of the Reploid's hands. Reploid or not, DR-31 was still a non-combatant and Naruto was loathe to fight a civilian. It probably would be for the best if he could just grab the package and high tail it out of the train.

It certainly would make his day.

But things were rarely that simple.

_Zap!_

"Ow! Damn it!" Naruto cursed as he slammed into an invisible barrier. "I should have known it wouldn't be that easy," he groaned as the red sphere activated and started to move towards him, "especially considering that the stupid red ball has a Pantheon head stuck in the middle of it."

"T…this is the en…engine core that has been merged with a Pantheon!" DR-31 exclaimed fearfully, "It's powerful enough to take down elite combat-Reploids! Someone like you doesn't have a chance!" The Reploid sounded like he was trying to reassure himself more than anything else. "This barrier won't drop until you've b…beaten the engine core!"

Ignoring the terrified Reploid, Naruto prepared himself for any sort of attacks. The merged Pantheon-core appeared to be mostly immobile aside from sliding forward and backwards within the car. It didn't seem to have any method of attacking besides a small pipe-like structure beneath it. Naruto initially thought it might some sort of enhanced buster, but scratched that hypothesis from his mind when he remembered that they were inside a train. Even with reinforced walls, firing long-ranged powerful attacks was not a good idea.

Maybe it was a rapid-fire but normal-powered buster that was hard to avoid? Or perhaps some energy beam that only reached a certain distance?

Naruto got his answer to how the Reploid attacked rather quickly when he saw a large stream of flames bursting out from the hole. It wasn't quite large enough to reach the further part of the room, but Naruto had been standing only a few feet from the hole.

He dodged backwards, only to be shocked when the part of the floor he was standing on lifted itself and propelled him up towards the now spiked ceiling.

"**Tsuin Rasengan (Twin Spiraling Spheres)!**"

Naruto quickly slammed his hands towards the spikes that were directly above him, both to remove the threat of being impaled and to create room for his room as the floor slammed into the spikes.

"Im…im…possible!" DR-31 breathed out. Naruto glared at the Reploid as the floor lowered again.

"I'm guessing you're the one who controls the ground, while this ugly thing breathes fire at me," Naruto growled.

Despite his displeasure, Naruto knew a good strategy when he saw one. The engine core would keep the enemy busy with its flame attacks and the train operator would take that time to raise different areas of the floor to mess with the enemy's footing and to kill the enemy using the spikes above.

That didn't do anything to reduce his annoyance and irritation.

"Y…you will p…pay for this! T…the government w…won't let you r…run amok if you h…hurt me!"

Naruto ignored the Reploid again, but kept his senses up. He was technically fighting one enemy but he had to keep his eyes peeled in any and in all direction. Attacks could pretty much come from anywhere.

Naruto rolled forward this time under the fire as the flames shot towards him, just in time to avoid getting smashed into the ceiling again. He threw several energy shuriken that were knocked off path by a rising floor piece. The train conductor, while a terrified civilian, definitely knew what he was doing.

_Fire-based attacks from this Pantheon core means its core itself is heat-based…so use water jutsu to defend and lightning jutsu to attack…well, it works out that I just received some more chakra from that clone guarding Ciel-chan dispelling itself._

He flashed through hand seals and put both his hands forward. "**Raiton: Raitei no Taiho (Lightning Release: Cannon of Thunder Emperor!)**"

A large ball of lighting shot forward from his hands.

Naruto put his arms up to guard against the small bursts of electricity that sparked towards him after his lightning blast hit the engine core. It was a good thing that Naruto didn't have to create water from his chakra in this hot and dry room. Even just that one technique was a significant drain on his chakra. And Naruto knew that one solid hit wasn't going to be enough to take down the engine core.

"Ahh!" DR-31 screamed as tendrils of lightning flashed all throughout the room. The Reploid was protected by his barrier, but apparently that did nothing to stop him from being terrified at the show of power from Naruto.

Naruto dodged to the side this time to avoid the rising floor. He cursed and shot forward when the floor piece he had just jumped to started to rise. Clearly, more than one floor piece could be lifted up and weren't only controlled by the train operator. Some of the floor pieces themselves seemed to have sensors. Naruto took out several kunai and shuriken and threw them all across the room, activating the different sensors and forcing the floor pieces to rise up.

He saw the hole slowly gathering flames. Naruto decided not to give the enemy any more time. He had finished gathering enough chakra for his next technique. "And I don't think _I_ care if this train is irreparably destroyed." He jumped behind one of the floor pieces to avoid the flames that shot out and flashed through a long series of hand seals. "**Raiton: Raitei Eisou (Lightning Release: Thunder Emperor's Laser Spear)!**"

The concentrated lightning-charged beam of blue energy pierced through the metal cylinder now in front of him—a spring-like structure to lift the floor—and slammed into the engine core, right where the Pantheon head was, and then spread outward.

_Boom!_

Naruto braced himself as the shockwave of the explosion hit him. The explosion was much more limited that he had expected, but that may have been because he was standing behind the lifted floor piece.

He panted heavily as he watched the smoke from the explosion clear. He was really lucky the engine core wasn't mobile. Otherwise, he would have had a much harder time aiming those two lightning techniques. With relatively little to worry about, Naruto had been able to use his chakra sparingly and effectively.

Given the small explosion and how the train had stopped, Naruto knew he had destroyed the core. Still, nothing was over until the fat lady sang—seeing the corpse, in this case—so Naruto kept his guard up.

The smoke cleared, revealing an unprotected Reploid on the floor in front of a huge gaping hole in the train.

"D…don't kill me!" the Reploid train operator stammered as Naruto slowly walked towards him. "I'll h…hand over the p…package! Just sp…spare me!"

Naruto nodded. He took the package and opened it to make sure the Cyber-Elf was inside. "What?!" Naruto growled. "It's empty!"

* * *

In the end, they hadn't needed to send Naruto any reinforcements for his unsanctioned and self-given "mission." Naruto had arrived just a little after they arrived, via his personal Trans Server.

"So what did you do with the train operator?" Ciel asked, somewhat worried. Naruto didn't look like the type to kill non-combatants, but it was hard to judge from external appearances alone. Moreover, Naruto had shown that he had much more to him than what he normally showed.

He was now in mission control with her and Cerveau. After making sure that he was perfectly fine, aside from light burns that already seemed to be healing, they interrogated him about what had happened.

"I placed him under a genjutsu to interrogate him," the boy explained with a shrug.

"Genjutsu? Aren't they simple illusions?" Ciel asked. Naruto had explained some of his techniques in the past to give her an idea of just what he could do and Naruto had described genjutsu as a collection of illusory techniques.

Naruto nodded. "I don't want to give a complicated and theoretical analysis of techniques that are now extinct, so you can think of genjutsu as techniques that manipulate the brain. As I already explained to you, most genjutsu techniques manifest as illusions, but a few rare ones can be used for interrogations as well."

"I see."

"Unfortunately, genjutsu doesn't seem to work for too long against Reploids, even if they're untrained, but I had more than enough time to check if he was lying or not. The package did have the Cyber-Elf. There wasn't much more I could do at that point, so I sent him on his way and transferred myself back to the base."

Ciel nodded as she watched the baby Cyber-Elf zip around the room. "He wasn't lying. I can see the Cyber-Elf."

"I know. I couldn't see it, but I could feel the energy that the Cyber-Elf was giving off. It has a rather familiar feel to it." Ciel frowned. That made no sense at all. There was nothing about Cyber-Elves that would be familiar to Naruto. She waited for him to elaborate and Naruto himself looked like he had something more to say on the subject, but he didn't say anything else about it. "But I don't understand why I can't see it at all."

"I would have been surprised if you _could_. Cyber-Elves are living pieces of data," Cerveau explained. "Reploids are designed to interact with data so it's natural that Reploids can see them. But humans evolved only to deal with the living world, not cyberspace."

"Ciel-chan seems to be an exception," Naruto noted, with a thoughtful look on his face. "Is this something to do with your special empathy with Reploids, Ciel-chan?"

Ciel nodded, blushing again at the use of the term of endearment. She made a mental note to ask him why he started calling her that the next time she saw him alone. For some reason, he started calling her that after her birthday party. She did like it and didn't mention it before because it felt so…_right_…but it still was somewhat of a surprise.

"I can't give you any other explanation than that. I don't know if there's a specific reason that I can, but even among the Enlightened Ones, I alone have the ability to see and communicate with them."

"The Cyber-Elf appears to be an animal elf, Ciel," Cerveau said with a hand on his chin. "It certainly corroborates what Naruto heard about Copy X wanting to use it personally. He was most likely looking for a power upgrade."

"Wait, wait," Naruto said as he waved his arms. "_Copy _X?"

Ciel let out a little squeak and sent a glare towards Cerveau, who was now looking abashed. Cerveau should have known better to let something like that out. "Yes," she sighed. "The ruler of Arcadia, Copy X, is simply a copy of the original legendary hero X. The real X disappeared and no one knows where he is. Copy X…" she paused here to choose her words carefully, "…was created to fill the power void left after the real X's disappearance."

She trusted Naruto, but she didn't want to reveal that _she _was the one who had created Copy X. It was still her life's greatest shame and she desperately hoped that Naruto would never find out the ugly truth about her past.

"Oh," Naruto shrugged. "That makes more sense now. I had thought it was weird that a legendary hero would suddenly go criminally insane and violent. Anyway, the Cyber-Elf?"

Ciel blinked and shared a stunned look with Cerveau. Naruto wasn't going to ask any more questions? Maybe she had been overly paranoid for no reason if that was all it took to satisfy Naruto's curiosity.

"Um…" she managed out. "Right…!" She took a deep breath. She needed to calm down and stop being so fearful. "There are three main types of Cyber-Elves: nurse, animal, and hacker. Nurse elves can heal and repair Reploids. Animal elves can improve the specifications of Reploids. Hacker elves can manipulate data in the environment, including enemy data. I…I used a hacker elf to free you from your seal."

Naruto had long since explained about fuinjutsu, the branch of ninjutsu that used chakra flow and movement to create remarkable effects. According to Naruto, chakra manipulated the environment in subtle ways. By manipulating chakra to move through different patterns, the user can essentially do almost anything he or she wished. The drawback to fuinjustu, however, was that the patterns needed for such effects were immensely complex and time-consuming. In the past, apparently, very few people chose such a tedious and esoteric field. Naruto apparently had been able to bypass much of the time requirement using his shadow clones to speed up the learning process.

"Oh…" Naruto said contemplatively. "So that's how you did it. I thought the seals had degraded over time and you somehow used a buster to wake me up." Naruto's look turned serious. "Wait…" Naruto said slowly, "I protected this base using seals. Can't Neo Arcadia deactivate those seals using these hacker Cyber-Elves?"

"That's probably not possible," Cerveau said gently as Ciel looked down. She was reminded of the sacrifice that Passy had made. Ciel would be lying if she said she wasn't pleased with the way things turned out, but it was still a massive blow to lose her close friend, even if that friend was simply living data and destined to disappear from the real world.

"Huh?" Naruto asked. "Why not?"

"Cyber-Elves are already rare to begin with. Moreover, they die when they are used."

Naruto winced and gave her a look of pity. "And you share some sort of empathic connection with them." Ciel's eyes widened when she felt his arms around her. "I'm sorry."

Her breath quickened but she allowed herself to lean into his body. "It's…it's not something you or anyone has to be sorry about. If anything, it was simply because my own efforts were insufficient."

There was a long pause as she closed her eyes and allowed herself to be held.

"Ahem…I hope you two realize that I'm still here…"

They sprang apart and Ciel felt like the face could boil water from how hot it was.

"Way to ruin the moment, you insensitive prick!" Naruto shouted, although he too had a bright red face.

Ciel could tell that Cerveau was rolling his eyes behind his visor. "I don't think I'll ever truly understand human behavior. We Reploids have emotions and feelings just as you humans do, but very few Reploids truly fall in—"

"Cerveau!" Ciel interrupted in mortification. She did _not _need to hear the end of that statement. She was most certainly not in love and did not need to endure any more embarrassment for simply accepting _just _a hug from a friend.

Deciding that a tactical retreat was probably the best option here, she turned around without another word and left the two others behind as she went to her room.

* * *

Naruto glared at the Reploid engineer. "You could have found a better way to distract her than _that_. She's going to start getting ideas if you and everyone else keeps saying that there's something between us."

Cerveau was an asshole for making a heartfelt moment like that end awkwardly. Naruto could take the teasing from the others since none of them really interacted with him and Ciel at the same time, but Cerveau should have known better than to do that.

Naruto only got a smirk from the Reploid, however. "I just call it as I see it. Are you really denying that you feel something for her? You've started to call her Ciel-_chan_ as well."

He snorted. "It's been like what…four weeks? Five weeks maybe?" Naruto shook his head. "That's hardly enough time for something truly deep. I use –chan as a term of endearment. That doesn't necessarily mean I have romantic feelings towards her or anyone else. And besides, I don't want that kind of relationship with Ciel-chan. I…" Naruto paused to find the right words, "tend to get attached a too easily to the people around me for no good reason whatsoever. It happened in the past as well."

"Oh?" Cerveau replied, giving Naruto an appraisingly look. "It sounds like you're getting your memories back."

Naruto nodded. There was no use denying the truth. "There was this girl…" Naruto began before sighing. Bad memories began swelling up in his mind. "She—" Naruto choked on his words and stopped there.

"What?"

"Never mind," Naruto muttered as he turned around to leave as well. Thinking about Sakura always had ruined his mood, even in the past. It was just his crappy luck to like a girl who loved someone else…a person who was an utter jackass that no one else in the world cared for. And it was even more unfortunate that the jackass was his one-time best friend.

Just thinking about that _stung_, even now.

"Naruto, wait," Naruto stopped walking. He wasn't sure why did, but he stopped to listen to what the Reploid engineer had to say. "I don't know any details of your past, but I don't think you should be stuck on something that happened so long ago."

Naruto turned around, livid. "Well, to me, it doesn't _feel _like it was a thousand years ago," Naruto snarled, making the Reploid take a step back in surprise. "A lot of my emotions are muted because I don't remember, but the things I _do _remember feel like they happened just yesterday."

And Naruto was sure that his feelings about this would only get particularly worse.

"It's _still _in the past," Cerveau repeated. "It's not like I don't understand. I have a lot of friends who died over the course of the last six years. I'm a Reploid, but I have feelings of attachment and anger just like you. When my friends died, I didn't just brush it off. I became upset, too. But that doesn't mean that I didn't continue to look towards the future."

Naruto laughed bitterly. "So you're telling me to 'heal' my heart by seeking a relationship with the first girl I meet after waking up from a thousand year slumber. This after only a perceived six or seven months after the girl I loved die?"

"I'm not telling you to doanything," the Reploid engineer returned calmly. "Like I said, I'm calling it as I see it. Frankly, I've never seen Ciel act like she has in the last month since you joined us. There's something that she feels for you that is beyond normal friendship and companionship."

"That's _her _issue then," Naruto retorted in a way that was much harsher than he intended. He winced when he remembered that Hinata had been in love with him for almost as long as he had been in love with Sakura. And he still rejected her. He couldn't really control his heart and no matter how Hinata felt towards him, his heart had been somewhere else. And after Sakura had killed herself over Sasuke, Naruto didn't really want to think about love again.

Naruto valued friendship, and companionship even more, and he was thrilled that Ciel care for him that much, but he was frightened at the prospect of _love _now, especially after his memories started resurfacing. When he first woke up after being unsealed by Ciel, he didn't remember Sakura or anyone else so it had been rather easy to open his heart to Ciel. But now, his memories of his past love and all the drama were coming back and Naruto was torn between wanting to keep the girl at an arm's length and getting closer to her.

"Perhaps," Cerveau admitted. "But you treat her differently than the others here in the base. I initially thought it was because she was the only human around and because you're still unused to the idea of Reploids, but I suspect there's something more."

"It could just be hormones," Naruto muttered, half in frustration, half in jest. "Boy meets girl. Boy does something stupid. Girl thinks it's funny, develops superficial feelings for the boy. Boy and girl dance around each other in some long and convoluted courtship ritual. Relationship never works out."

Cerveau laughed. "Again, it's one of those things about humans I'll never be able to understand."

Naruto sighed. "Look. I care about Ciel-chan, more than just simple acquaintances, coworkers, or even comrades. I find her incredibly attractive and I think she's a sweet girl. But, I'm just not looking for a romantic relationship right now. I…" Naruto paused. "I never really had friends growing up. Even among ninjas I had a fearsome power inside of me and people were frightened by that and stayed away. So the few _real _friends I made, I treasured. It's like that with Ciel-chan. Nothing more."

Cerveau crossed his arms. "You sound like you're trying to convince yourself more than anyone else."

Naruto groaned. "Look, if I tell you a bit about my past, will you lay off on the teasing?" Naruto didn't even bother waiting for an answer. "There was this girl I loved every since I was really little. Despite the fact that she was insufferably cruel to me in our youth, I really loved her."

"Why?"

"I first fell in love with her because I saw how she desired for acknowledgement, just like I did. Of course, she found her friends much sooner than I did and her outer personality completely changed after that, but that never changed my feelings about her. Eventually, we were even placed on the same ninja team and grew to be really close. She never really returned my feelings, but she still became one of the first people to acknowledge me."

"Then she died?"

Naruto nodded. "But that in itself isn't really the biggest problem." Naruto ran his hand through his hair in frustration. "It's how she died. Sakura-c…Sakura was in love with my other teammate. Unlike me, Sasuke was a genius and everyone in the village loved him. He used to get a dozen marriage proposals every day and would rebuff them without a care in the world. I used to be really jealous of him. But he eventually became my best friend."

Cerveau winced. "I think I can see where this is going. There are plenty of dramas and movies with this kind of storyline."

"Tell me about it," Naruto muttered. Cerveau didn't even know half the story yet. "Anyway, but even with the entire world showering him with attention, Sasuke betrayed us and left to join our enemies." Naruto shook his head as he recounted the next part of the story. "Sakura _still_ loved him after that and even made me swear an oath to bring him back."

"What happened after that? You brought him back only for him to kill her or something?"

Naruto chuckled darkly. "Something like that. Sasuke almost killed me on three separate occasions and almost killed Sakura as well. He became an international criminal and there wasn't a single country that didn't want his head for one reason or another." Naruto took a deep breath. "But later, he did agree to come back to us and rejoin our village. I don't think I ever saw Sakura happier than I saw her on that day. I was fine with that…I…I really just wanted her to be happy more than anything. But that was still in the middle of war and Sasuke ended up dying in the war effort. And…because of that…Sakura committed suicide."

Cerveau winced again. "Not only did she reject your love for someone who didn't even care about her. She even rejected the idea of living as your friend to follow this Sasuke fellow in death."

"That's more or less the story," Naruto concluded. "My love life was so screwed up that I don't really want anything to do with romance right now. It just brings up bad memories. So…I'm pretty certain when I say that nothing's going to happen between me and Ciel-chan. It's not just me being in denial or anything; I have legitimate reasons for not wanting to look at her in that sort of way."

Cerveau shook his head sadly. "You're just continuing to inflict pain on yourself, you know."

"Perhaps," Naruto admitted, "but that doesn't mean I should just grab the first girl I see as a solution to my problem. I haven't even met any other humans here. And I have plenty of time to think about stuff like this so I'm not in a rush."

* * *

**Author's Note: I realized that it's harder to put in as much detail as I would like. I suddenly noticed that a lot of the Mega Man Zero missions are incredibly short (probably several hours at the most) unlike missions in the ninja world (several weeks at a time). Naturally, this makes sense. _Mega Man Zero_ is a game and it's hard to put in a lot of plot in a game whereas _Naruto_ is a manga & anime. But for the purposes of this story, this has got to change; otherwise, it'll just be a major battle every single chapter. So it might take a bit more time editing and changing the outline that I previously had. As for the battles, they will get progressively harder, especially once the Guardians begin to make their appearances. It's still relatively early in the story (the story goes on until Mega Man Zero 4) so please be patient with me.  
**

**Also, I'm getting some questions about Zero. At this point in time, Zero may or may not show up. I'm still trying to figure out how to put Zero into this story and if it would make sense at all to have Zero in the story. Feel free to send me PMs or reviews with ideas; I'll take them all into consideration.  
**

**One last thing, the flashbacks don't necessarily foreshadow anything. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But the primary purpose of the flashbacks is to provide information about Naruto's past that isn't from canon.**

**And as always, reviews will be appreciated. Thanks!**

* * *

_**Naruto's Jutsu List**_

**Technique:** Fuuton: Fuujin Seigaifu (Wind Release: Holy Shroud of the Wind God)  
**Rank:** S-rank  
**Class:** Supplementary  
**Range:** Close Range  
**Description:** The user emits wind chakra that covers the user's body. The winds surrounding the user's body can be used to propel the user at incredibly fast speeds, much faster than what would be physically possible with muscle strength alone. The winds can also act to automatically defend the user from attacks as well as be used to attack enemies nearby. The chakra requirement for this technique is massive, making this technique a kinjutsu.

**Technique:** Tsuin Rasengan (Twin Spiraling Spheres)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Close Range  
**Description:** A variant of the normal Rasengan that uses a Rasengan in both hands.

**Technique:** Raiton: Raitei no Taiho (Lightning Release: Cannon of Thunder Emperor)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Mid-Range  
**Description:** The user fires off a huge ball of lightning energy towards the target, which spreads out once it hits the target. The technique trades the piercing power of lightning for the ability to paralyze the target, leaving the target open to other attacks.

**Technique:** Raiton: Raitei Eisou (Lightning Release: Thunder Emperor's Laser Spear)  
**Rank:** A-rank  
**Class:** Offensive  
**Range:** Mid-Range  
**Description:** The user fires off a large concentrated blast of lightning energy towards the target. Unlike the Raiton: Raitei no Taiho (Lightning Release: Cannon of Thunder Emperor), this technique has no paralyzing power but has incredible piercing and penetrating power. Despite the concentrated nature of this technique, the damage range is still rather large, especially after it hits the target.


	6. Hidden Base & Stop the Hacking 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own _Naruto_ or _Mega Man Zero_.**

* * *

Ciel didn't see Naruto very much for the next two to three weeks. Every time they met, Naruto would find an excuse to disappear.

She found it rather puzzling.

She had given up trying to wait passively for Naruto to come and talk with her like he had the first five weeks he had been at the Resistance Base. Instead, she decided to go seek him out. But after many failed searches for the blond ninja, she turned to his students.

"How are you two doing?" Ciel asked with a bright smile. From the looks of it, the two had greatly improved. Naruto had claimed that they weren't quite ready for battle just yet, but Ciel was willing to bet that the two of them would wipe the floor with anyone else in the Resistance.

"Great!" Dande said cheerfully. "Naruto-shishou said that if we progress at the rate we are, he'll take us on a mission in a month or so."

"Naruto-_shishou_?" she asked incredulously. "Is Naruto starting some sort of doujou here?"

Faucon smirked. "Well, it annoys Naruto-shishou to no end when we call him that. He keeps telling us to call him Boss as if we're part of some sort of gang instead, but we don't really intend to listen to him. And considering he is teaching us how to fight, it's only fair that we call him our master."

Ciel giggled. "Is this some sort of revenge from all the torturous training I hear he makes you do?"

Dande groaned. "You have no idea, Ciel-san. We're incredibly lucky that Naruto-shishou's able to go out and hunt for energy crystals from the areas outside the Eden Dome. Otherwise, we'd probably spend years in hibernating mode just to recuperate."

Ciel frowned. Maybe that's why she had a hard time finding the blond ninja lately. Perhaps he just wasn't in the base. Ciel had already given him the green light to travel anywhere as he pleased so long as he reported back regularly. She didn't like it, but she wasn't really in a place to order him not to. And he proved that he could take care of himself multiple times.

"That reminds me. How busy is Naruto these days?" Ciel asked, getting to the real reason why she sought them out. "I haven't had the time to really speak with him at all lately. Is he always outside the base?"

"Um…" Dande paused from his training. The young Reploid had been working on some sort of agility exercise. "I'm not sure. He has clones around here and there so I wouldn't say he's always outside the base. If anything, I think he's constantly _inside_ the base working on something or another."

"What do you mean?"

"Naruto-shishou has been reading several books on technology and talking with Rouge and Jaune about something or another."

"Rouge and Jaune?" Ciel frowned. Those two were the relatively new members of the Resistance who had been rescued a year before. They were both computer administrators and technicians who had been scheduled to be retired after they chanced upon classified files during a routine checkup of Neo Arcadia's networks.

"Yes," Faucon grunted as he practiced swinging around a metal rod with an energy blade at the tip. "He also mentioned something about an infiltration mission." Faucon gave her a curious look. "I thought Naruto-shishou would check up with you on that, Ciel-san."

She shook her head. "I haven't really spoken to him in the last two or three weeks besides daily greetings and scheduled reports. It's almost as if he's avoiding me…"

"Eh?" Dande exclaimed. "There's no way he'd avoid you. He thinks the world of you! And besides, he li—oof!" Dande sputtered as Faucon hit him with the rod. "Hey, what was that for?!"

Faucon ignored the helmet-wearing Reploid. "Ciel-san, we'll tell him that you were looking for him."

She nodded. "I'd appreciate that."

"Is there anything else you need?"

She shook her head and walked past them to go see Cerveau, pushing her fears that she somehow offended Naruto to the corner of her mind.

* * *

"Amazing! I still don't understand how you're learning all this in such a short period of time, Naruto-san."

Naruto rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Well, I keep telling you that I have a way of learning stuff really quickly."

How was he to explain that he had a hundred shadow clones hidden throughout the base studying all this material and improving his learning speed nearly a hundredfold?

Naruto had spent the last several weeks studying computer science with Rouge and Jaune. Neither of them claimed to be professional hackers—although they were definitely capable of being ones—but both did know more than enough to manage the small network that the Resistance had set up and help Ciel and Cerveau ward off hacking attempts from Neo Arcadia.

"Really quickly is actually understating things, Naruto-san," Rouge muttered. "You learned two years' worth of programming and coding in a few weeks. At this rate, you'll be teaching _us _by in a month or two."

Naruto was working with them on maintaining the firewall at the moment. He had wanted to test his abilities in hacking, but there was really no real safe way to test it out beyond basic simulations they tried out.

Jaune giggled. "Actually, I think he'll be teaching us stuff by next week. Look," Jaune pointed, "he's already covering for your mistakes here."

Rouge got a tic mark on her head. "_My _mistakes? You're the careless one! If you want to talk about mistakes…what about yours? Just the other day, you forgot to set up the firewall on our network. If we had gone ahead and left things as is, Neo Arcadia would have found our location and razed this base to the ground!"

Naruto blinked. He hadn't known that Jaune had made a mistake _that _big when Rouge had first complained to him about it last week. She had initially made it out to be a small mistake that anyone could have made.

Clearly, there had been more to the story.

A sweat drop appeared on the back of Naruto's head as he watched the two female Reploids go at it. His two weeks with them had taught him that while the two were incredibly close friends, they fought whenever they had the chance. Rouge was the more meticulous and serious one while Jaune was the more flexible and carefree one. Trying to make them fit their approach to the other's was like trying to mix oil and water. But at the same time, it was why the two of them were very effective. They would see things that the other wouldn't.

"Um ladies!" Naruto shouted. He gave them both reproachful looks.

The two of them stopped arguing and looked down in shame.

"Sorry, Naruto-san," they both mumbled.

Looking to break the uncomfortable silence, Naruto looked around the small room they were in. "I never asked, but why does our base have so few computers? Can't Ciel-chan go and buy more?"

Jaune perked up. "Well, it's not really a matter of money. We can certainly afford to buy a few computers or even steal some in raids…"

"Then?" Naruto raised an eyebrow.

"Ciel-san was of the opinion that the less we were connected, the better. We don't have our own cyberspace so we have to use into the one that Neo Arcadia has. More computers linked to Neo Arcadia's cyberspace puts us at risk of being discovered," Rouge explained. "We _can_ hook up to Neo Arcadia's cyberspace anytime, but Ciel-san strictly forbids it."

Naruto frowned. "That doesn't explain why we don't have our own independent network here."

"We do," Rouge replied. "It's just very small with very few things in the base actually connected to it. Besides Ciel-san's and Cerveau-san's computers, which mainly have research files, the only other things connected are the surveillance cameras around the base and various communication devices around the base."

Jaune shrugged. "Not many people here care too much about using computers. Before Rouge and I got here, Ciel-san and Cerveau-san were the only ones who had one and that was only for research purposes. For the most part, people in the Resistance just live simple lives."

"If you're curious about our network, we can get your personal computer connected," Rouge offered, before making a snide comment about Jaune, "and maybe you could see how careless Jaune is for yourself, Naruto-san."

Naruto ignored Jaune's indignant retort and nodded as he resumed working on his computer, trying to figure out a way to improve his hacking abilities. Right now, to him, Neo Arcadia was a black box of information. He had a growing sense that his future enemies would be stronger and Naruto wasn't in the mood to wait until they attacked. He wanted to be the one making the first move.

His eyes caught several things once he got onto the network for the first time.

"Top secret files?" Naruto asked out loud. "Does the Resistance even have anything that's not known to any of its members?"

"Eh?" Jaune asked. "Oh, we noticed that, too! It popped up around a month and half ago."

_Two months? _Naruto thought. _That sounds suspicious. I've been here for about two months now…so around a month and half ago would be just after I arrived…what is Ciel-chan hiding? _

"We can't access it at all," Rouge said, almost reading his mind. "Jaune and I were curious, so we tried."

Naruto looked at them. "Isn't that kind of behavior what got you kicked out of Neo Arcadia in the first place?" Naruto asked wryly.

They both shrugged.

They had told him their story about how they had accidentally access top-secret files on the Four Guardians while in Neo Arcadia. The files they obtained had information detailing the initial purpose of the Four Guardians. Apparently, before Neo Arcadia became militarized, the Four Guardians had been specialized Reploids, each designed after a specific function that X was able to carry out, charged with cleaning the planet and making it habitable again. The specific files showed the modifications done on the Guardians to make them into heavy-hitting combat Reploids.

Most of it was harmless information, but the two were accused of being Resistance spies and sentenced to retirement.

"I'm sure Ciel-san knew that we would try," Jaune said cheerfully. "And she also knows that she's so much better than we are that we'll never be able to access her files. She's on a completely different level, even compared to the top Neo Arcadian scientists."

"Apparently…" Naruto agreed, "Wow…she even went as far as to list it as top secret. If she wanted to keep things hidden, it might have been better to name them something far less eye-catching. She's pretty much daring us to try." Naruto got a mischievous look in his eyes. "Well…do you want to try breaking in again…this time with me?"

* * *

Copy X looked down haughtily at the civilian Reploid from his throne in Area X. If his memory served him correctly, the Reploid's serial number was DR-31. It was usually beneath him to learn the serial numbers of mass production Reploids, but this particular one had caused him a great deal of trouble.

"So, you're telling me that you _lost _Shelter?"

"With all due respect, the Cyber-Elf was stolen," the pitiful Reploid sniffed.

"Master, we confirmed his story by scanning his memory banks. DR-31 is not telling a lie." Copy X nodded at Harpuia, his right-hand Reploid. He was annoyed at Harpuia's little interruption, but Copy X knew that the green Reploid was only trying to be helpful. While Harpuia was annoying, Copy X couldn't deny that Harpuia was both competent and loyal.

"I know. I've read your report on the matter. It's quite detailed. Good work." Copy X, however, didn't lose any of his scorn for the pathetic fool groveling beneath him. Copy X pointed his X-buster and began to charge up a mega buster shot. "DR-31, you have thirty seconds to give me a reason why I shouldn't blow you to pieces. Shelter was an incredibly important asset of war that we could have used against the Resistance."

"X-sama, spare me!" DR-31 cried out. "The Resistance soldier was incredibly powerful! He even took down the Pantheon Core in the engine room! I assure you, X-sama, that there was little I could do! I'm just a civilian Reploid…my specifications don't allow me to fight!"

Copy X lowered his buster but kept it charged. "That is true," he growled before smirking in a predatory way. "However, what I don't quite understand is _how _the Resistance found out about Shelter. This was supposed to be a top-secret mission. We took great care not to have any leaks. Even the train that you operated hadn't even been decided _until the very moment you received the Cyber-Elf._" Copy X's red eyes glinted malevolently. "It makes me wonder if the enemy overheard a conversation you might have had with CS-58."

The Reploid turned pale.

"Oh?" Copy X asked with a smirk. "I see that my guess is right." Copy X raised his buster and fired. "Die, fool."

Harpuia released a stream of wind to clear the debris and smoke in Area X. "X-sama, was that really necessary? He was only a civilian Reploid. And strictly speaking, it was CS-58's fault to release the classified information."

Copy X rolled his eyes. "There was no need to spare the fool. Reploids like that are just a waste of energy and space. Besides, we have all the information we need from his memory banks regarding this _human_ from the Resistance."

"A human, sir?" Harpuia did his best to hide his surprise but Copy X wasn't fooled.

"Yes," Copy X replied. "In your report, DR-31's memory banks had been slightly altered but not corrupted. Based on the original unaltered memory that you were able to extract, you reported that the enemy had initially thought that Shelter wasn't in the package that he stole. Only a human wouldn't be able to see a Cyber-Elf."

"But sir!" Harpuia exclaimed. "Humans don't have the fighting capabilities that we saw from DR-31's memories! Wouldn't it be more likely that Ciel of the Resistance created a new Reploid that wasn't able to see Cyber-Elves?"

Copy X snorted. "What would be the point of that, Harpuia? Reploids, in their default state, are able to see Cyber-Elves. Why would Ciel go out of her way to take that ability away? The simpler explanation would be that our new enemy is a human Maverick who has terrifying combat abilities."

"That's…that's…"

Copy X ignored his servant's blabbering. "There were reports about two months ago that Ciel and her Resistance cronies visited some abandoned ruins, correct?"

"Ah…yes," Harpuia reported. "We were even able to get a visual of Ciel and her subordinates. There were about over twenty members of the Resistance present. All the bodies except Ciel's were accounted for, however."

"And yet the damage we incurred was tremendous. Dozens of Pantheon deaths and hundreds more injured and damaged." X furrowed his brow. That kind of power didn't just lie around everywhere. "It appears that Ciel found something special in the ruins. It would explain how the Reploid Disposal Center was destroyed so quickly before we could send any reinforcements as well."

"We figured it was a bomb. The Resistance members have used them in the past before. They have a talented engineer they call Cerveau who is able to create such weapons."

"I care not for the names of trash," Copy X growled. "Nor do I care for pathetic tools like bombs. No, I was thinking about Zero. Under most circumstances, I would imagine this was the work of Zero."

"We know that she was seeking out Zero," Harpuia began. "That's why we sent our troops after her when she began to move towards those ruins. Based on the energy readings of the area, we had cause to believe that she had finally found Zero. The residual energy in the area once whatever seal present was broken didn't appear to resemble Zero's energy signature so we thought nothing of it. X-sama, are you saying that this new Resistance fighter is the legendary Reploid Zero?"

"Idiot," Copy X said in derision. "I said under most circumstances. But this is different. Zero would have been able to see the Cyber-Elf. And as you yourself mentioned, the energy signature didn't resemble Zero's. No, this new fighter is definitely human." Copy X paused before barking out an order. "Hm…I want you to send Maha Ganeshariff to guard the area in case they come back. Send troops of Pantheons to see if there are any other clues in the area. I have to admit…I am very intrigued."

Copy X shook with excitement. He didn't know how a human had managed to become so strong, but none of that mattered. Copy X only hoped that this human, whoever he was, was strong enough to let him test his mighty strength. After all, every hero needed a foil.

Harpuia bowed. "Your wish is my command, X-sama."

* * *

In the end, none of them were able to bypass the security that Ciel had set up.

Naruto, much to Jaune's and Rouge's surprise, had gotten the closest, figuring out that Ciel blanket-marked all files involving X and Copy X as classified, but even he couldn't discover anything beyond that.

Still, despite his curiosity, Naruto was happy at his progress. Ciel was reputedly the smartest mind in the entire world at the time and if Naruto could circumvent some of her guards, then he could probably run circles around Neo Arcadia's.

Hopefully, anyway.

He whistled a jaunty tune as headed downstairs to the training room where his two minions were training.

As soon as he entered, he felt the tip of an energy blade pointed at his neck as well as the barrel of a buster on the side of his head.

"Not bad," Naruto said in a singsong voice as blood dripped from the slight cut on his neck.

"We finally got you?" Dande sounded almost disbelieving.

Naruto chuckled. "Nope. Of course not," he said as he disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving a log behind.

Naruto reappeared on the other side of the room without a wound. "You two are way too reliant on your eyes. I had already replaced myself before the two of you even noticed me enter."

Faucon grumbled. "It's not fair to trick us with illusions like that, Naruto-shishou."

Naruto groaned. He hated formalities and ranks and the two idiots insisted on calling him a master. He was sure that it was intentional now because the two would say it more often when they were annoyed.

"Forget the illusions!" Dande growled, "I want to know where he gets all these damn logs! There's barely any life on the planet and Naruto-shishou's dumping logs on us like it's free candy."

"And the log sayeth: 'come to me, all those who art fearful and in danger, and I will give thee protection'," Naruto said piously with closed eyes and clasped hands.

"You know that it's really creepy when you act like that, Naruto-shishou," Faucon said dryly.

Naruto opened his eyes and shrugged. "It's still Naruto 72 and the two of you 0. You've tried everything from surprise attacks, distractions, direct attacks…and still you haven't managed to land a hit on me…all thanks to the holy log."

Faucon sighed. "Well, at least we know we won't ever freeze to death if Naruto-shishou has an infinite number of logs we can burn."

Naruto laughed. Despite their failure to land a blow, Naruto was pleasantly surprised at their improvement…in both fighting and humor. "Anyway, jokes aside, how is your training going?" He looked specifically at Faucon. "I wasn't sure about letting you use the Triple Rod. It's much stronger than uncharged buster shots, but it forces you to be much closer to your enemy."

Cerveau had designed the weapon based on Naruto's plans for his two students. The blade wasn't nowhere near as powerful as Zero's beam saber, the weapon the Triple Rod was loosely based on, but it still was capable of a fair amount of damage. As for the styles of fighting…Naruto didn't want both of his students to fight in the same way. He wanted them to be able to cover for each other and use versatility to overcome stronger enemies. Dande already had much better accuracy and talent for shooting with greater agility allowing him to quickly escape and hide behind corners. His skills were much more suited for buster-based combat. Faucon, on the other hand, seemed to be naturally stronger and durable. He was fast and could cover quite a bit of distance, but couldn't change directions as quickly as Dande could. It was better for him to stay locked in one spot and try to fend off enemies instead. The Triple Rod was ideal for that; the metal portion could repel buster shots while the bladed portion could cut through through the toughest of Reploid armor. And the rod itself could extend quite a bit if Faucon needed to keep enemies at bay.

"Well," Faucon said with a frown, "I've lost every sparring match against Dande with this thing. I just can't move fast enough with it and Dande's already much more agile than I am to begin with."

Naruto crossed his arms. "If I do take you to fight with me, you'll probably be starting off with a buster, so don't get too attached to the weapon just yet. It's really unfortunate that your natural build and style seems to be much more suited to close combat." Naruto sighed. "But the combat Reploids will eat you alive in close combat though."

"So should I go back to practicing exclusively with a buster, then?" Faucon asked.

"Maybe we should get you a sword instead," Naruto muttered, more to himself before he nodded. "Keep the Triple Rod with you, but work only with busters for now. Until we have a way of improving your defense and durability beyond what it already is, you'll have to work at a distance. I have some ideas of how to change your body's specifications, but I want to check with Cerveau and Ciel-chan first."

"Ah! That reminds me," Dande interjected. "Ciel-san was here just a while ago. She wanted to speak with you."

"Ciel-chan did?" Naruto asked curiously as he noted Faucon groaned and giving Dande a dirty look. "Did she say why?"

Naruto frowned. _Did something happen? A new mission, maybe?_

Dande shook his head. "No, but she looked a bit distraught. She seemed to be under the impression that you were avoiding her." Dande paused. "You're not, right?"

Oh…so _that's _what this was about.

Naruto didn't answer. If he had to be completely honest, he had been avoiding Ciel. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say he hadn't been seeking her out every single day like he had in the past. What Cerveau had said to him still weighed heavily upon his heart and he didn't want to lead the girl on in case she really was developing feelings for him.

"You're kidding," Dande's jaw dropped. "You're actually avoiding her? You had a lovers' quarrel?!"

"Dande," Faucon hissed loudly. "Shut up. You're being tactless as always."

"Wait," Dande said in disbelief. "I thought that Faucon was pulling my leg when he said that you and Ciel-san had a fight? I should have known!" Dande slammed his fist into his palm. "I just _knew_ there was something strange about the way Ciel-san looked."

"Says the person who theorized that the problem was that Naruto-shishou lacked _endurance_…" Faucon retorted in annoyance.

Naruto twitched. He didn't even want to ask about how Reploids knew about such things. This whole situation was getting out of hand if people were saying that he and Ciel were sleeping together. Neither of them were legal…well…at least by the standards of Naruto's time…although Naruto was getting closer to that age.

"I'm going to kill both of you if you don't shut up," Naruto growled out in irritation. "Where did she say she was going to be? I should go talk to her."

"We're not sure, but it looked like she was heading towards Cerveau-san's lab," Faucon answered.

Naruto nodded. "Both of you can take the rest of the day off. I'll see you later."

He walked towards Cerveau's room, before realizing he didn't know exactly what to say to Ciel.

He turned around and walked away to gather himself. He wasn't really ready for this.

Naruto mentally cursed. It was Cerveau's fault, damn it. Why did that meddling Reploid have to make the situation more than it was? Now Naruto couldn't even be himself around Ciel without feeling like he was doing something wrong.

* * *

"I'm sure it doesn't have to do with that at all," Cerveau said while he patted Ciel on the shoulder. The girl had come in earlier to discuss a multitude of topics. But given Ciel's reaction to _this _particular topic, Cerveau figured that it had been the real reason why she had come down to see him. "Naruto just has been busy. That's all."

Ciel shook her head. "It just makes no sense whatsoever. He used to spend hours with me everyday. There's just no other explanation why his behavior towards me would suddenly change."

"Ciel, look, the truth about Copy X is classified information even within Neo Arcadia. A handful of people in the Resistance even know about it. There's no way Naruto could have found out."

She gave him an accusing look. "You let it slip a few weeks ago that X _was _a copy to begin with. He's been avoiding me since then…"

Cerveau winced. He wasn't the best at keeping his mouth shut and he had forgotten that Naruto didn't know that previously. It's just that Ciel and Naruto appeared to be so close and comfortable with each other that Cerveau simply talked to them as if they were one and the same.

"Are you even sure he's avoiding you?" Cerveau sighed. He had his own suspicions on why Naruto would be avoiding Ciel, but he didn't exactly know how to tell the poor girl.

Ciel nodded and wiped her tears with a tissue. "He just sees me to give me reports and then leaves immediately after. Even when I try to extend the conversation, he somehow gives me an excuse to slip out."

Cerveau mentally groaned. _Naruto, you idiot…I didn't tell you everything I did just so that you could completely break off ties with Ciel._

He was sorely tempted to tell Ciel to flat out come to term with her own feelings, but that approach hadn't worked well with Naruto. Cerveau sorely regretted having that chat with Naruto a few weeks ago. Maybe he shouldn't have pushed Naruto too hard. The boy clearly had mental scars from his life and Cerveau had underestimated how severely the boy would react.

So Cerveau decided to take another approach with his first human friend. "Ciel, what's so wrong with that?"

The girl looked at him quizzically. "What do you mean?"

"What are you so afraid of?" Cerveau asked rhetorically. "You're afraid that Naruto would leave us if he found out that _you_ created Copy X after X disappeared right?" Cerveau and Ciel both turned their heads when an electronic pen dropped from his desk and cracked. Cerveau briefly wondered if that was a bad omen or something that signaled Naruto _would _abandon them if he truly did find out, but shook his head at that ridiculous thought. The Reploid engineer was a believer in science; he shouldn't waste his energy thinking about old wives' tales. "Well, let's assume that Naruto _did _find out and that's the reason he's been avoiding you. He hasn't left us yet, right? So there's no harm."

Ciel sniffed and wiped her eyes again. "I…that's right…" she said slowly.

Cerveau smirked as she fell into his trap and nodded. "So…then…you have nothing to be sad about. So what if he avoids you? He's still willing to fight for us. You told me that that's all you care about, right?"

Ciel looked shell-shocked at that. He could almost hear the gears turning in Ciel's head. It wasn't that Ciel feared Naruto leaving the Resistance; she feared that Naruto would leave _her_.

Having been her friend for the longest period of time, he knew her better than anyone else. She was selfless to a fault, but even she had her own insecurities. After seeing the terrible things that Copy X did, she felt guilty for everything Copy X did and consequently, thought herself as a horrible person. She rationalized that her attachment towards Naruto was her desire to save her Reploid friends because she was convinced that she was too "evil" to be liked and treasured by anyone. But it was just a disguise for how she really felt about the blond boy from the past. The true source of Ciel's deathly fear of Naruto finding out the truth was that her worry that Naruto would judge _her _once he found out that she was the creator of Copy X.

"I…I…" she stammered.

"Of course…things change if you're saying there's a different _personal _reason why you're so distraught…"

Cerveau mentally did a jig in his mind. He could see the comprehension dawning on her face. Ciel was incredibly smart and self-reflective. Once presented with the truth, she wouldn't blatantly deny that it was there.

Ciel suddenly stood up and wiped her eyes one last time. "Thank you, Cerveau." Ciel gave him a bright but obviously fake smile. "I hadn't thought of it like that. It was my mistake to be so down for no good reason whatsoever. I feel much better now."

With that, the girl abruptly left his laboratory.

He groaned and slapped his palm to his head. So Ciel wasn't going to admit to the very end. "Ugh, humans…"

* * *

Naruto frowned as he looked down at the computer screen with Jaune and Rouge. "So you're saying that this is a hidden base relatively near our base."

"Pretty much. We stumbled on this by accident," Jaune said with a sheepish smile. "We were applying some of the tactics you used to try and enter Ciel-san's sealed files in our approach in hacking Neo Arcadian servers and we found this."

"On the first try, too," Rouge said seriously, although Naruto could tell she was fighting off a satisfied smirk. "I can only imagine what else we can find if we dig deeper."

"Ciel-chan's going to be angry when she finds out. Didn't you say that she strictly forbids people hooking up computers to Neo Arcadia's cyberspace?" Naruto asked in a flat tone.

"Well, neither of us are quite good at listening to orders," Jaune giggled.

Rouge snorted. "Speak for yourself. You were the one who recklessly hooked your computer up to their network. I almost had a heart attack when you first told me you were fooling around inside Neo Arcadia's cyberspace. I had to make sure you wouldn't cause _too _much trouble."

Naruto laughed. It definitely sounded like the two of them. It was the same way they had gotten kicked out of Neo Arcadia. It was probably why they were showing _him_ everything they found instead of Ciel. The two of them knew that Naruto really didn't play by or care for the rules himself.

Jaune gave a bright smile. "Glad to know you care," she said cheekily before frowning. "But still, this is pretty serious stuff."

Rouge pointed at a large screen in their room. "Here, we'll get it up on the larger monitor so we can all see it at once."

They spend the next few minutes reading parts of the reports that Jaune and Rouge swiped. The three of them paled when they read just what the purpose of the hidden Neo Arcadian base was.

Naruto swore. "I can't say I fully understand, but that's why there have been so many attacks on our limited servers."

Rouge looked grim as well. "It also makes sense why most of the attacks were rather easy to repel as well. The problem is the sheer volume along with the few advanced attacks the specialists manage to try and sneak in. Ciel-san was wondering about this very same thing. It would make very little sense for Neo Arcadia to waste valuable energy and resources coming after us with these half-baked attacks."

"With automated computers, they could have all the volume they want and with this base being _outside_ of the Eden Dome," Naruto muttered, "and with this Anubis Necromancess gathering energy crystals out in the wild, they'll never run out of energy. It's a brilliant idea…to have a self-reliant military base out in the middle of nowhere."

It really was. Without even knowing it, Naruto had been doing the same thing the Neo Arcadia was doing: gathering the near infinite energy crystals outside the Eden Dome. Killing the seemingly endless waves Mavericks that swarmed him each time he left the safety of the Eden Dome was annoying, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. And the reward was definitely worth the cost.

Clearly, Neo Arcadia felt the same way and took that idea to the extreme.

"And the base itself is underwater _and _underground, preventing it from both Maverick and enemy attacks," Rouge added. "The coordinates of the base are provided here," she pointed to a spot on the large monitor, "but we don't have the means to take over the base."

"What are we going to do?" Jaune said in a grave tone, serious for once. "It's not necessarily an essential to destroy this base and the effort in doing so would be incredibly costly. Ciel-san would never approve of such a mission." Naruto felt the looks of both of the Reploid women on him. They probably knew that he was planning to sack the base.

Naruto nodded. "Ciel-chan would probably prefer staving off the attacks herself than sending people over." He gave the two annoyed looks. "What? I'm not going to run off at any second so calm down."

Jaune looked at him dubiously. "You're pretty reckless, Naruto-san."

Naruto rolled his eyes. Jaune had no right to lecture anyone about recklessness. "Pot meet kettle." Naruto gestured towards the screen. "I'd call _this _reckless, just in a nonviolent way. Anyway, let's gather more information first."

Rouge groaned. "That's all but confirming that you're going to go, Naruto-san. You do know that there are thousands of Pantheons guarding this place. You also have the potential to meet two B-ranks in Anubis Necromancess and Blizzack Staggroff as well as an _A-rank_ in Fairy Leviathan, right? The Guardians are on a whole new level. It's said that the Guardians could each handle multiple B-ranks on their own."

"Rushing into a battle with one of them is suicide," Jaune added helpfully. "I hear that Leviathan is particularly playful with those she kills." Jaune shuddered. "Dismembering, puncturing…and she'd make you stay alive and functional for the entire process."

Naruto rolled his eyes again. "Try not to speak as if I'm marching to my own funeral. And it hasn't even been decided that I'm going."

Naruto would have snorted if it were someone else saying that. Of course, he was going to go. Thousands of Pantheons? Naruto was a walking one-man army with his ability to spam shadow clones. Powerful B-rank combat Reploids? Naruto had been able to take them down with almost no injuries. And the few he did have didn't even last two hours. A Guardian of Copy X could solo multiple B-ranks? Well, it wasn't like Naruto had used any of his trump cards either; he was sure he could do the same.

He was definitely going to sack that base. It was now just a matter of finding a convenient excuse.

* * *

Ciel's mind was racing. She had quickly stumbled to her own room and collapsed on her bed to think.

What Cerveau had implied was absurd. She didn't have any romantic feelings towards Naruto. Her _body _might be attracted to Naruto, but that was to be expected. She was a human girl and he was a human boy in a base with no other humans. Humans were designed to be attracted to those physical near them and those they were familiar with.

Given how much they saw each other, it would be strange if there _weren't _any physical attraction and even infatuation between her and Naruto.

And given the constant danger they were in, it wouldn't surprise her if she misattributed those adrenaline rushes for feelings of attraction.

But some sort of special emotional attachment? Preposterous!

Love? Impossible!

And yet, she couldn't deny that she felt different around Naruto. She constantly felt emotionally confused around the boy. It wasn't just her face flushing or feeling her heart race. She felt _connected _to him somehow.

She wasn't an expert on romance, but the little she _did_ know told her that yes, she was indeed in love with Naruto. She was simply trying to deny it all this time.

It wasn't supposed to be this way though. She couldn't afford to get distracted from her mission. She was about to scream in frustration, probably for the first time in her life, when she heard a knock on her door.

"Yes?" she sat up on her bed.

"Ciel-chan?" Naruto walked in.

She was both pleased and irritated when her bad mood lifted. Pleased that she didn't feel so crummy anymore. Irritated that it just proved that Cerveau more or less right.

"I see that you got the message I left for you from Dande-kun and Faucon-kun," she said flatly. She mentally cringed at her own tone. Her displeasure was clearly evident in her voice.

"Heh," Naruto rubbed that back of his head sheepishly. "Sorry, I heard that you told them that you thought I was avoiding you. I didn't mean to make you feel worried. You didn't do anything to make me upset or anything."

She nodded, but felt her face flush in embarrassment. "A…ah yes."

Was Naruto visiting her out of pity now? Anger surged in her heart. This wasn't what she wanted.

"Can I sit down?" Naruto gestured towards her chair.

She shook her head. "I'm a little busy now, Naruto. Can this wait?"

Ciel knew it was rather petty of her to kick Naruto out like that, but she wasn't really listening to her rational side. Right now, she was upset and confused and she wanted to make Naruto feel the same way.

Although she didn't have any reason to think that kicking him out of her room would make him feel upset.

Naruto ignored her and sat down on her chair.

"Working this hard can't be good for your health," he said lightly as he tapped all the papers on her desk. They were her notes for creating an alternative energy source. She didn't get to work on it too much because she was busy with Resistance work, but with Naruto taking a bulk of those responsibilities and streamlining the process, she found that she had a bit more time. She had initially thought to sleep with the extra time, but remembered that she had other work to do. "I recall that I was told that I trained far too much for my own good, but you work harder than I ever did…or at least I think I ever did."

Ciel sighed and looked at Naruto. On one hand, she felt frustrated that Naruto was still here while she was upset…at…something or someone…but on the other hand, she decided that she wanted the boy she liked—yes, _liked_—close to her. As confused as she was, she didn't exactly want him to leave.

…that was the point of liking someone, right? To enjoy that person's very presence?

It was quite a conundrum that she couldn't fully explain herself. It was as if her heart was trying to go in two different directions. Dealing with love was rather baffling.

She still had to save face, however.

"I have to do this, Naruto." She pointed at the papers that Naruto was tapping. "If I continue my research, I might find a way to end this war without losing even more lives. I can't be dawdling when I have time." She remembered something else and sighed. "Not to mention…the hacking…if I don't continually make sure our small network is protected, then Neo Arcadia may be able to discover where we are and launch a full-scale attack. We won't be able to survive that."

"What about Jaune and Rouge?"

She shook her head. "They're capable, but we all know that Neo Arcadia has capable technicians as well. And they outnumber us, too. We need someone with skills beyond Jaune's and Rouge's to keep Neo Arcadia at bay." Ciel felt rather uncomfortable at implying that she was better than the two computer technicians, but it _was _the truth. While Jaune and Rouge were top-of-the-line experts, Neo Arcadia had plenty of Reploids on their level; after all, Neo Arcadia could simply mass-produce more of them. Ciel, on the other hand, was an unparalleled genius beyond what Neo Arcadia could simply make on short-notice and had the benefit of studying and making progress for her entire life as well whereas Neo Arcadia aimed more for stability and status quo.

Naruto shrugged. "Okay…but I could argue back and say that if you collapse, then Neo Arcadia will almost certainly take that opportunity to find out where we are. You need to take a break, Ciel-chan."

She felt her face flush at Naruto's familiarity with her. Yes, Naruto had been calling her that over the last two months, but it still made her feel awkward around him. It was worse now that she was sure she had romantic feelings towards him.

Ciel then remembered that she was going to ask him about that.

"You know, Naruto…I don't ever recall giving you permission to give me a pet-name."

Naruto laughed. "Oh come on, Ciel-_chan_." Naruto emphasized the diminutive term of endearment and she blushed again. Oh yes, it was _definitely_ muchworse now that she was certain of her feelings. "Don't be such a spoilsport. I told you that I'm not good with keeping my distance with people, especially with people around my age."

That gave Ciel pause and she decided to give up on trying to get him to leave. It was a good opportunity to get more information on the mysterious boy. He had provided bits and pieces of his still recovering memory, but hadn't provided a comprehensive history of his life. It was Naruto's prerogative if he didn't want to share every aspect of his life, but if he was going to take residence in her room, then it was only right that he pay with information.

That was a justifiable reason to grill her crush, right?

"How old are you anyway? You mentioned that you were older than me, so I know that much, but nothing specific. I read quite a few historical texts mentioning young and powerful warriors, but you seem to have started fighting far younger than what those texts suggested for such a powerful fighter."

The blond boy shrugged. "I'm seventeen."

Ciel felt a wave of pity wash through her. That really was barely older than she was. Given how powerful Naruto was, he must have started training from an extremely young age. Such a thing was unheard of in modern history and would have been considered child abuse.

Naruto apparently couldn't read her thoughts, however, and was rambling on. "To be honest, my age isn't important though."

"Isn't important? Why not?" she inquired in a curious tone. "How could your age not matter? Even now, age is used as a means to determine if human have reached maturity and whether they can work or get married." Her cheeks turned red at that thought. "And you're the one who made a big deal about my birthday. I would have thought that something like this was important to you."

Naruto had an unreadable expression on his face. It was almost as if he was remembering something distasteful about one of his birthdays. Ciel winced when she suddenly remembered what Naruto had told her the previous week. Naruto's parents had died on his birthday and the Kyuubi had been sealed inside of him with his parents' birth. In her eagerness to find out more about Naruto, that little tidbit had slipped her mind.

She must have sounded tactless.

"It's not that at all. It has to do with longevity," Naruto furrowed his brow. "I know that I'm going to be extremely long-lived. My family was generally long-lived compared to other families. And even within my family, I was…special…different…from the others for various reasons. So there's no point in keeping track of my age and comparing it to age scale of others. I'll end up looking younger and outliving everyone I know."

_Ah…he's similar to me, then, _Ciel noted. She too was going to be incredibly long-lived and maintain youthful vigor for far longer than other humans. _I wonder if people back then had forms of genetic modification. Based on the few things that Naruto has told me so far, it seems that people were willing to do anything for power and ambition._

Still, the fact that Naruto was unlike others and similar to her made her feel happy. Ciel wondered if this had been part of the reason she felt such an innate connection with the older boy, since she herself had been ostracized because of her differences. Because of her superior intellect, children hadn't understood her and adults had been wary about her.

"I'm not so sure about that," she said with a small smile. "I doubt you'd be outliving me. I'll live several hundred years at the very least."

Naruto looked at her dubiously. "Another one of your perks from being an Enlightened One?"

Ciel nodded. "When I said my genes were maximized to the fullest extent, I meant it in all aspects. That meant intelligence, physical energy, and even lifespan."

Naruto suddenly looked serious. "Ah yes…that reminds me…about the last few weeks…I had a lot of things on my mind."

"A…a lot of things…?" she asked slowly, holding her body to prevent herself from shivering. Ciel tilted her head lightly in acknowledgment, wondering what this could be about. _A lot of things? He couldn't possibly mean…no…it's probably not that…_What Cerveau had told her reassured her that Naruto didn't know anything about Copy X, but at the same time, the serious look on Naruto's face was unsettling.

Naruto smiled lightly at her. "It has nothing to do with you, Ciel-chan, so don't worry." Ciel wanted to smack her head in frustration. Her irrational fear must have been evident on her face. That or Naruto was able to read her too easily. "I think it's probably best if I'm upfront about certain things with you." She watched carefully as Naruto struggled to find the right words. "I…I had a really difficult past…" he managed out rather lamely before hitting himself. "Lately, a lot more of my memories have been coming back."

"I see…" What else could she say? She suddenly felt rather pathetic for thinking that Naruto had been upset with her when he was most likely sorting through his thoughts.

"Do you?" he asked sadly. "At first when you woke me up, it was easy to adjust because there wasn't much about my past I remembered. But slowly, memories of my home, my friends, the life I lived…came back to me." Naruto looked at her intently. "Remember when I told you that I was sealed away because I was too powerful?"

She nodded. How could she forget? The idea that there could be a human so powerful as to threaten the stability and balance of the world was still mind-boggling. "You also mentioned that even as powerful as you are now, you're nowhere near as powerful as you once were."

"Yup," Naruto confirmed. "But I never told you the _reason _I was so powerful. It wasn't an accident." Naruto exhaled loudly. "It's still a pain to explain, but I feel like it should be done since I feel that we're going to be spending a lot of time together in the future. I'm going to ask that you don't interrupt until I'm finished though."

Her heart leapt at that. Naruto _wasn't _leaving and was deciding to make the conscious choice to become even closer to her.

"O…okay…"

"The day I was born…October 10…an evil enemy released a huge chakra beast inside my village and controlled it to cause tremendous amount of destruction. There were only nine of these chakra beasts and they were so powerful, they could change the very landscape. The particular one that was released in my village was the Kyuubi, the strongest of the chakra beasts. My dad was the village leader at the time. It took his and my mom's sacrifice to seal the Kyuubi inside of me." Naruto paused as if he was remembering something particularly painful. "It…it…the sealing of the Kyuubi made me naturally more powerful than most of my peers as my body adapted to the Kyuubi's potent chakra. It's why I have so much energy to throw around."

She nodded. Things were beginning to make a bit more sense now. She had always been intrigued by Naruto's vitality. Naruto had been able to function on less sleep than even someone like her. Naruto healed far more quickly than any human she met.

And that must have been one of those "various reasons" he alluded to when he said that he would live longer than normal humans.

But the cost of all those benefits had been to have a massive beast sealed inside of him…

She couldn't help but shiver at that thought.

Naruto must have noticed. "Yeah, that's what the people of my village thought, too. If you're scared, you don't have to worry now. I don't have the Kyuubi inside of me anymore," Naruto said in a neutral tone. "But back then, chakra beasts were considered monsters and demons during that time and most of the villagers thought of me as the Kyuubi itself."

She gasped. It didn't take much to read in between the lines. "So…so…they…they abused you?"

"More or less," Naruto said bitterly. "No one had ever tried to kill me…which was what happened to one of my best friends who also had a chakra beast sealed in him…but I was pretty much an outcast within my own village and everyone turned a blind eye whenever someone did something bad to me."

She looked at him in a horrified manner. "B…but your dad was the leader!"

Naruto let out a dark laugh. Ciel trembled at the hardness in his voice. She hadn't known that Naruto could be that cold and distant. It seemed very uncharacteristic of him since he was always exuded brightness and warmth.

"No one knew that…or at least…no one was willing to admit that until much later. I eventually was able to strike an accord with the Kyuubi and use his powers to help my village survive multiple invasions and come out victorious in a world war. Only after that did people really accept me. But even after that, I was forced to seal myself away in order to maintain peace between the villages."

"_You _sealed _yourself_ away?" Ciel asked in disbelief. That was news. She knew he had been sealed, but to think he did it himself. "Why?"

"It'll take too long to explain, but long story short, I was the only remaining 'demon' container, the only human superweapon, alive. I didn't want to fight in another war and see more of my friends killed," Naruto said softly.

She just looked at him in stunned silence. Naruto had willingly thrown his own life away for the sake of his friends and for his village. This after all the untold abuse he received from his village when he was young.

"Why…" she murmured. "Why are you telling me this?"

It made no sense for Naruto to come to her and just unload all of this on her. She appreciated the gesture, but didn't understand why.

Naruto gave her a soft smile, although Ciel briefly thought she could see something else in his expression as well…a more mischievous one.

"To build trust."

"Trust?" she asked in confusion.

He chuckled. "I used to worry a lot about what people would think about me. Any friends I made—the kids of my village weren't told about the demon sealed inside of me—I didn't want them to find out about the Kyuubi. I didn't want to be judged and further ostracized." Ciel looked at Naruto's blue eyes intently. It was almost as if he _knew _what she was worrying about and was trying to tell her that everything was still fine. "But eventually I realized that not telling my close friends meant that I wasn't fully trusting them. I wasn't trusting that they would look beyond my past and beyond what was out of my control. It meant that I didn't have enough faith that they would care about me and love me unconditionally."

His words hit very close to home. She felt happy that Naruto made a show of trust to her, but felt guilty that she wasn't doing the same for him. She wasn't quite ready to tell him, but understood that he was willing to look past all of that.

Judging by the gentle smile on his face, Ciel got the feeling that he understood how she felt. She felt a huge burden on her heart for being responsible for this entire war between the Resistance and Neo Arcadia.

"Thank you, Naruto," she replied. "Thank you for trusting me." _And saying that you're willing to forgive me for anything I might have done in the past._

Ciel felt a surge of warm feelings rise in her chest, far stronger than ones in the past. Naruto…really was a good person. Looking at it objectively, she figured she really didn't have a chance…he was just _too _perfect. Kind, sincere, determined, strong…what more could a girl want?

It would be strange if she hadn't fallen for him.

The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. What if…what if Naruto had someone he loved in the past? With how Naruto was, surely some other girl would have liked him first, right?

Ciel had to bite her lower lip to prevent herself from asking the question on the tip of her tongue.

"Of course," Naruto replied before smirking. "Now I don't have to worry about you constantly struggling whether you want to ask me something about my past. I'm pretty much an open book to you now so don't worry about offending me or anything like that with questions."

Ciel flushed. So he _had _noticed. But there was no way she was going to ask about what she had been wondering about just now.

"That's not all, though," Naruto continued.

She gave him a confused look. "What do you mean?"

"I noticed that the energy readings from the Cyber-Elf vaguely resembles that of the chakra beasts. It's nothing too serious, but I still wanted to ask you about their origins."

Ciel frowned. "I don't know entirely myself. I know that Cyber-Elves can be _created _somehow, but that it requires years of exposure to certain energy sources. For example, the Eden Dome is powered by a power generator in sub-Arcadia and most Cyber-Elves spontaneously arise there."

"I see," Naruto mused. "What about the power generator itself? Where does it derives its power."

"Well," Ciel hesitated. She didn't know the answer herself and she didn't want to give him something inaccurate. These chakra beasts that Naruto was talking about seemed to be a crucial point for Naruto and Ciel didn't want to mislead him in any way.

"Well?"

She sighed. "You have to understand that much of this was before my time so I can't give you an entirely accurate answer. Neo Arcadia has plenty of dark secrets that aren't accessible even by the highest of officials."

Naruto nodded. "That's fine. Just tell me what you do know and I'll try to figure out the rest."

She took a deep breath. "Official Neo Arcadian documents say that the power generator is linked to the core of the planet and that the planet itself provides the energy." She paused to see Naruto's reaction.

To her surprise, he didn't look astonished at all. If anything, he seemed to expect that sort of answer. "Well, I suppose that might explain it," Naruto said with his arms crossed and a look of intense concentration on his face. "At its core, the energy from the chakra beasts come from the earth itself so I could be sensing that. Thanks for letting me know."

Ciel wasn't so sure herself. If the power generator were truly running on the planet's energy, then there wouldn't have such an energy crisis forcing Neo Arcadia to forcibly retire Reploids deemed useless. But at the same time, she could be overestimating the planet itself as well. The planet _was _mostly a barren wasteland and could be on its last legs so Neo Arcadia could very well be telling the truth.

"Of course," she replied quickly before shyly sitting on her bed and staring at Naruto.

After a_ long _period of awkward silence, Naruto suddenly turned and gestured towards the papers on her desk. "What is all this junk by the way?"

"It's not junk!" Ciel protested indignantly. "It's research I've been working on for years!"

Naruto laughed heartily at that. "To each to his…or her…own. I don't think I would ever like all this academic stuff."

"Science can change the world!" She _had_ to believe that. That was the point of the Resistance. They would fight to buy her time to solve this energy crisis.

Naruto raised his arms up defensively. "Wow there. I'm not devaluing anything that you're doing. I just don't like pouring through books and stuff."

"Like you've been doing with Jaune and Rouge?" Ciel snapped at him accusingly. Naruto blinked at that. Even Ciel was rather surprised at her own tone. _Oh great…now I'm showing signs of jealousy. And for Reploid girls no less. This is ridiculous._

Naruto then adopted a sheepish look. "Ah…I figured that I had to learn something about this world. So much of this world is digitalized so I decided that I had to become familiar with computers and technology. Reading books is a small price to pay for that."

She shook her head. "Learning how to hack isn't what I would call simple learning…plenty of people in this world make do without learning how to bypass security measures on secret files."

Naruto grinned mischievously. "Perhaps, but 'plenty of people' don't get kicks out of pranking Neo Arcadia by replacing all their state news articles with articles about the great and sexy Naruto Uzumaki of the Resistance!"

"You did what?!" she almost screamed as she stood up from her bed. Ciel noted that Naruto managed to remember his family name. Normally, she would have commented on it, but the rest of Naruto's declaration was so alarming.

Naruto broke out into laughter. "Hahaha! You should look at your face Ciel-chan! You look like you just saw a ghost!"

She sat back down, fuming after she realizing that Naruto had just pranked _her_. "That wasn't funny, Naruto! I thought I was going to have a heart attack!" She shook her head in disbelief. "You should be more serious about these kinds of things. You're such an enigma, Naruto. You're two older than I am, fight as if you fought for decades, yet act at times as if you're a toddler."

"You wound me," Naruto said theatrically, holding his heart as if he had been shot, before looking at her seriously after he saw that he got her to smile. "I learned early on in my life that it's more difficult to live life with a serious attitude than a flippant one." Naruto put his hands to his mouth in mock surprise and outrage. "See! You're a bad influence on me! You're making me use big words that make me look a lot more serious now."

Ciel just giggled at the older boy's antics but didn't let her inner thoughts show on her face.

So Naruto _was_ much smarter than he let on as well. She had thought that she was imagining the flashes of intelligence and wisdom that shone through his eyes when he spoke about different things. In a way, that was more difficult for Ciel to accept. It meant that Naruto had a deceptive nature to him and shouldn't be fully trusted.

But her heart immediately rebelled at and rejected that thought.

Naruto was nothing but kind and caring to her and the Resistance. There was no way he had any sort of ulterior motive. His happy mask, so to speak, was probably the result of his childhood trauma.

"Hello?" Ciel's eyes snapped back into focus when she saw Naruto waving his hand in front of her face.

"Yes?"

"You totally zoned out on me," Naruto said in displeasure.

"I did no such thing!" Ciel stammered back, face red from having been caught with her mind wandering. She had been doing that more in the last few months since Naruto joined the Resistance.

Naruto shook his head firmly. "I was right. This happened because you're too tired. You've only been getting two hours of sleep a night for the last month."

Ciel blinked in surprise. "How do you even know that? I work in my room late at night and lock the door…" And the walls were almost completely sound-proof. The sounds of pages flipping and pens scribbling would be snuffed out entirely.

Naruto ignored her question. "You _will_ go to sleep or I will _make_ you."

She shrunk back and squeaked when Naruto leaned forward ominously and looked straight into her eyes. _He's…he's too…too close…I can't focus! _Ciel almost began hyperventilating, especially when she felt an incredibly irrational yet very strong urge to tilt her head forward to have her lips meet his.

"I…I…I…"

Naruto finished for her, "…will go to sleep. Say that after me. 'I will go to sleep.'"

Ciel felt lightheaded for some strange reason. And why did Naruto's eyes look strange? Instead of their normal bright blue, they seemed dull, blurry, and…huh, were they deep red? That thought was dropped as Naruto's command reverberated in her mind.

"I will…go…to…to…sleep," she repeated, yawning at the end of the sentence.

And with that, everything went black.

* * *

**Author's Note: I toyed with the idea of making Ciel question her feelings for a longer time...say maybe until the end of the first portion of the story (i.e. the defeat of Copy X)...but realized that Ciel would need time after being sure of her own feelings before finally confessing (as she almost did at the end of Mega Man Zero before Zero enters the Neo Arcadian Core). Having Ciel wrestle over her one-sided affections, at least...one-sided for now, works just as well. If anything, I suppose it would be progress in this Naruto x Ciel story that hasn't been Naruto x Ciel very much since it's still early in the story.  
**

**The more perceptive readers might note that I am planning on combining the Find Hidden Base, Find Shuttle, and Stop the Hacking missions. Of course, this is all for story-telling purposes. Unfortunately, if I make up mini-arcs for every single boss in the Mega Man Zero universe, then this story will never end. Moreover, the battles between Naruto and the bosses will become very boring to read as Naruto will wipe the floor with most of them.**

**As always, reviews will be appreciated.**


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